Do We Have Any Idea What Might Happen When The Human Brain Reaches Its "Memory Limit?"

[GreysonCarlisle]

My own story:

I was devising a sort of demographics program, and while planning how it would work, I visualized all of the different kinds of people and their relationships to each other. The quick and dirty is that I was trying to hold the basic data and the relationship structures for every person in the US in my mind at once.

The effects were similar to early-onset dementia. You know the absent-minded professor trope? This was that on steroids. I forgot to cook the chicken one night. Luckily, my girlfriend instinctively refused to eat a raw, frozen chicken breast. Then I couldn’t recall her name, and never you mind that we’d been living together for over a decade. I was becoming a hazard to myself and to others.

ETA: and my girlfriend’s favorite symptom–I would repeat the same thing two or three times in our conversations. She was really getting scared for me.

But it was only a problem while or immediately after I was turning the data over in my head. Distract me with something else for fifteen minutes, and I was back to normal. Though, during that period, I could not recall what happened on the last episode of any of the TV shows we watched together. I had to rewatch whole seasons of some of them.

I’m sure that I didn’t actually exceed my brain’s “memory limit.” And (if we’re continuing the comparison to computers), it was probably more an issue with the CPU than with the RAM. Or maybe it would have been closer to bad database indexing or even disc access. The memories and the knowledge were still there, but for whatever reason, I could not always access it.

[pjd]

We need compression.
https://i.ibb.co/XzZt4JR/mybrainisfull.jpg

[nearwildheaven]

“60 Minutes” has done several pieces on people who had this memory anomaly, the best known of them being Marilu Henner. One of them was of a man who, for decades, has kept an entire fantasy football league of his own devising in his head; this aired in the same episode as a piece on Sarin gas being used in Syria, and I thought the most offensive thing, beyond that it happened, was that “60 Minutes” decided to air them at the same time. (MHO, of course.)

I also once saw a “Zits” cartoon where 15-year-old Jeremy knows he’s done studying when the top of his head pops off, and his brain vomits into his backpack. I sure understand that feeling, from my college days.

[phs3]

As others have noted, this is a terrible metric. I’ve also seen things like “The brain can ingest GB/sec”, which only makes the vaguest kind of sense if you mean “I can turn in a circle and see a ton of pixels while hearing a lot of stuff”. Just not meaningful.

[engineer_comp_geek]

Our brains don’t work like a computer. We don’t have filing cabinets or folders with stuff in them. Instead, our brains break things down in ways that we don’t fully understand.

For example, if you see an apple, your brain instantly recognizes it as an apple, and instantly recalls what an apple tastes like, how it feels in your hand, how much it weighs, what color it is, etc. The human brain is by far the best pattern matching machine on the face of the Earth. But your brain doesn’t go searching through its files, comparing every little red and round-ish object in its folders to what your eyes are seeing. Instead, a bunch of different parts of your brain all trigger at once, and the whole thing is put together to recall your memory of an apple.

As you age, some of the little interconnections fade or get lost, so your memories become fuzzier. If we would live to be a thousand years old, there’s no reason to think that this process would not continue. If you were a thousand years old, things from the most recent decades would be the most clear in your memories. Things from the last century would be a lot fuzzier, and stuff from 800 years ago would be all but forgotten. There’s no filing cabinet to fill up. Your brain would never get “full”. It would just keep going the way that it is now.

Kim Peek, who in many ways was the real life inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of Raymond in the movie Rain Man, was an interesting case, since one of the abnormalities in his brain was that it didn’t properly break things down the way a normal brain does. As a result, he could read two pages of a book at once, with his left eye scanning the left page and his right eye scanning the right page. And while he didn’t have 100 percent perfect recollection, he could recall almost everything that he had ever read. He knew every zip code in the U.S. and could give you driving directions to any city in the world because he had looked at maps and could recall them almost perfectly. But because his brain didn’t break things down properly, he couldn’t understand a lot of what he read. He had almost no understanding of abstract concepts. Everything was literal, like a computer. Fact in, fact out. Most jokes went right over his head.

Most people with that type of mental disorder are unable to function at all in social situations, but Kim learned to pick up on social cues and developed a lot of other coping skills that allowed him to be surprisingly social. For example, a reporter once asked him about Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. So Kim gave him the actual street address where Lincoln spoke, because that is literally the address where Lincoln was in Gettysburg. Kim didn’t understand it when the reporter laughed, but Kim did remember that the reporter laughed, and so he knew that he could use that “joke” in social situations, even though Kim didn’t actually understand why it was a joke.

Kim’s brain was more like a filing cabinet. A normal human brain isn’t. Our memories suck compare to Kim’s because we do break things down, and often those little bits don’t reconnect properly, especially as memories get older.

[Chronos]

As an illustration: You know what your mother looks like, right? Of course you do: You’d instantly recognize her, even from just a picture.

Now, describe her. If you know what she looks like, that should be easy… except it’s not.

[abcdefghij]

Ages ago, I arrived in my mom’s kindergarten(?) class right before we were going to go to lunch. She asked me to sit down with each kid and have them count and write down however far they got; no right or wrong answer and no prompting. Kid after kid got some somewhere in the teens and was done. Maybe one or two got to 21 or 22. Then this one kid sits down and starts counting: “one, two, three, four, … twenty-seven, twenty-eight, twenty-nine, … forty-three, forty-four, forty-five [at this point I’m thinking I’m going to have to stop him, because it was almost time for lunch] … fifty-eight, fifty-nine, sixty, sixty-one, sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four.” The kid was done.

Despite my instructions, my curiosity was piqued.
Me: “What comes after sixty-four?”
Kid: “I don’t know.”
Me: “What comes after four?”
Kid: “Five.”
Me: “What comes after twenty-four?”
Kid: “Twenty-five.”
Me: “What comes after fifty-four?”
Kid: “Fifty-five.”
Me: “So, what comes after sixty-four?”
Kid: “I don’t know.”

This kid had memorized every number up to 64. Every other kid in the class had memorized all their numbers, too, but their brains got full at around 15 to 20, and so they were going to have to figure out the pattern to get any further. I have often wondered if the remarkable memory of this one kid was actually a disadvantage, because it would delay him learning the pattern.

[burpo_the_wonder_mutt]

^ I’m having a hard time remembering your handle.

[md-2000]

@TriPolar

@Mangetout

If we become biologically immortal without any upgrade to our memory (and assuming the immortality includes the brain continuing to work in the same way indefinitely), we forget stuff.

(bolding mine)

That covers it right there. For whatever reason when you run out of memory you will forget stuff. Everybody hits that limit very early in life, we’ve all forgotten far more than we remember. Our capacity grows as we get older, but it never catches up to the amount of information that floods our heads every day.

Precisely this. I remember more of what I did, saw, thought about etc. the more recent it is. I can remember a few names that stick with me forever - Marc Monserat tried to abscond with my illustrated Canterbury Tales in Grade 5; Joey Brill got expelled that year; I knew someone named Anne Searcy when I was 5 (because I ended up with one of her Golden Books for years later); Freddie Perez flunked Grade 7 for the second time.

But really - I cannot tell you the names of most people I met in Grade School; or high school (but that’s a bit easier, since I have 5 years of yearbooks). I can’t remember a lot of the people I worked with 30 or 40 years ago, or in my college dorm, unless I have a special instance why I should. For oterhpieces of data, if I think about it and rack my brain, the answer will come to me in a few minutes - or a few days later it will just pop into my brain. Some things from 4 decades ago I have to time out - “it was a year after I did X, so it was the same year as Y” or “It was the year I lived in Z, so somehwere in this 2 year span…” Some things I don’t remember at all. Monty Python skits - I can remember verbatim.

So my conclusion is that things are slowly fading into the darkness, unless we pry them back into our frontal lobes.

@engineer_comp_geek

For example, if you see an apple, your brain instantly recognizes it as an apple, and instantly recalls what an apple tastes like, how it feels in your hand, how much it weighs, what color it is, etc. The human brain is by far the best pattern matching machine on the face of the Earth. But your brain doesn’t go searching through its files, comparing every little red and round-ish object in its folders to what your eyes are seeing. Instead, a bunch of different parts of your brain all trigger at once, and the whole thing is put together to recall your memory of an apple.

One explanation I saw is that the mind works in scripts. If I go to the doctor, I do the following - get in the car, drive to the nearby parking, walk to the office, check in, wait, shown to the room, etc. etc. The psychologist says, much of that is assumed if you try to recall it much later - the doctor is on Main Street, so I would have parked on the nearby Happy Trail road and walked, I don’t remember the weather being bad so I assume I wore just a tee-shirt, I do remember there was a different receptionist that one day (a memorable episode hung on that script), I remember she forgot to make me a follow-up appointment (another memorable episode on a script) I remember it was 10:00AM (memorable) so I must have gone to work after (script fills in the blank…)

So basically, a lot of our long term memory is scripts (“I must have done this…”) with memorable episodes attached.

[TriPolar]

@abcdefghij

Me: “So, what comes after sixty-four?”
Kid: “I don’t know.”

Maybe he only had a 6 bit processor.

[jjakucyk]

@burpo_the_wonder_mutt

This is me, some times, but I’m not blond.

Is that the episode where she goes on a gameshow and the final question is “name the person who scored four touchdowns in a single game while playing for the Polk High School Panthers in the 1966 city championship game versus Andrew Johnson High School” and she had no clue because of everything else crammed into her brain?

[HoneyBadgerDC]

I have noticed that I seem to store things differently. Something like part #'s for example. If I leave a job I will instantly erase most #'s associated with that job. I changed phone numbers a couple of years ago. Within two days I could no longer remember the number I had for over 30 years. If I find out something I once believed was wrong I will quickly erase what I no longer need to know. I think there is a lot we don’t understand about our memories.

[burpo_the_wonder_mutt]

A little research on my part says the episode you’re referring to is, “Kelly Knows Something (S8.E26).” Well, what do you know, here’s that very clip:

Al Bundy’s Greatest Loss

The shot-glass-of-a-brain episode is, “Here’s Looking at You, Kid (S3.E22),” featuring Al as the neighborhood peeper.

[thorny_locust]

@SmartBulbInc

Apparently, according to some research, the human brain has an estimated total memory of around 2.5 petybites. This is not much of a issue right now, for that is more than enough space for one human lifetime.

Even aside from what everyone else has pointed out about human lifespans: That’s only because we ignore or rapidly forget most of what’s happening all around us; and it’s been like that since before we were human. Nobody’s got the faintest idea of what all the perceivable bits of universe within their possible sight/scent/touch/hearing are doing at any given minute, let alone doing during a total human lifetime.

So I’d presume that the same defense mechanisms that keep us from being overwhelmed on a given Tuesday at 10:03 in the morning will work no matter how many Tuesdays get involved.