How much information can my brain store?

Factual Questions
1

Is there a limit to how many different things I can learn, and does this vary from brain to brain? If so, does this variation arise as a result of differences in the brain structure of individual human beings?

For example, maybe I want to learn all about two entirely different subjects, like law and computing. Obviously both these subjects are rather huge. Is there a cap to the amount of stuff I can “digest” from these two? Beyond a certain point, will the information just not register in my brain? Or does the brain have some ingenious method of learning whereby we can keep going on and on?

2

If you devote yourself to completely mastering both law and computing, this information will be stored in the areas of the brain formerly devoted to remembering what a girlfriend was or what sex was like.

3

:smiley:

…

4

recent studies have shown that perhaps your brain can store EVERYTHING. And I mean EVERYTHING. Occacionally during brain surgery, a doctor will prick part of someones brain. Becuase of this a person will have a memory of something completely random. They will have a memory of whatever is in the area that the doctor poked. This suggests that every memory and expierence is stored in your brain, making us much smarter than we actually think.
The really question is, how do we access this information? :eek:

5

That’s a little optimistic isn’t it? Do you have any source for the studies that you mention?

Hey for some the absense of the latter gives meaning to the former, though I don’t point that out from personal experience.

6

Hmm, well my opinion on this is that the brain DOES store everything. However the importance of the data is proportional in how often it is used. So if you’ve memorized a phone number at one time, but end up forgetting it in ten years, your brain will have allocated more if its resources to remembering what your present address is, your name, current events, etc.

I dont think anyone can learn everything with perfect recall, I just believe that there’s a limit to the amount of information we can easily access in our brains.

An analogy to my idea is having an empty glass in one hand and a jug in the other. All the important information you use on a regular basis goes into your glass, but once that overflows, the excess is poured into a jug. However that jug holds a ton of crap that you rarely use and thus recall is affected.

I just think we have a limited capacity for USEFUL information before pieces of it is pushed to the back of the mind.

7

I think one of the problems with figuring “how much the brain can store” is what the data in our head’s are “worth”.

I mean, in a purely computer HD sense, we have plenty in our heads. More than you’ll ever know. How does the memory of what you did last night translate into HD storage space? Do you want to translate all the sight memory into JPGs and MPEGs? How about smell or feelings?

Most of the information in our heads cannot be translated into hard driver space because there no context on how much “brain memory” translates into “HD space”.

8

I’m not saying you have to have an answer for this, but if you do, I’m curious. What would the physical mechanism for “forgetting” be? Is it more like the data being over-written, the neurons used for new things, or is it more like losing the “pointer” to the information which is still stored there? I’ve always pictured it as the latter, because that explains having your memory “jogged”.

9

IIRC as far as my neurology lectures at my re-certification course last year, it may well be that anything that makes it from short-term memory to long-term memory is kept forever. (Barring brain injury, that is.) Accessing these LTMs seems to be the problem.

However, the VAST majority of stuff we experience never gets out of STM, where it gets completely erased. It’s too trivial to make the effort to retain, so it goes bye-bye. STM can hold about 5-9 items at a time, and lasts about 15 or so seconds. That’s why one can look up a phone number, walk over to the phone, dial it, then never recall it again. STM is thought to be based on increased activity in existing synapes.

LTM on the other hand, seems to be based on the formation of new synapses.

It’s a complex topic, and things may not be as clear-cut as I’ve alleged them. :smiley:

10

Oh, and as for the OP, it’s difficult to assess what the storage limits might be. The current theories of holographic storage based on very complex synaptic connections outline a system completely unlike and also orders of magnitude more complex than the memory storage systems of computers.

It could well be the brain can learn all the information contained in a large set of encyclopedias, but accessing that data could be really, really tough.

OK, now I’m just speculating based on some currently accepted hypotheses, so I’ll quit.

11

I believe the following is a practically accurate way to look at it:

For all intents and purposes your brain storage capacity might as well be infinite. Unfortunaltely, the librarian in charge is a moron.

Think about it this way. Every single piece of information you get gets written down on a piece of paper. When the piece of paper gets full the halfwit librarian looks at it and decides if it’s important. If he feels that it’s important he copies it down in one of a series of loose leaf books for ready reference. If he doesn’t think it’s important he throws it on the pile.

By the time you’re an adult there’s a wall of loose leaf folders full of information that is pretty much at your fingertips (except where it got copied down wrong, or water damaged. There is also a pile the size of Mt. Everst of everything else that is stored in no particular order.

For example, in my shelf there is a book entitled “My Wife.” Come glance through the tabs with me (they are in no logical order.) Ahhh, here it is, “Things not to say to:”

In here I keep a list of everything I ever said or did that pissed my wife off.

This is a relatively important tab in a relatively important book so it’s kept well and up to date and referred to often.

Here’s another one. “My first dog.” I started this book when I was nine. It looks like a book written by a nine year old. Haven’t looked at this one for a while.

Here’s another one “Experiences with mind altering substances” as you can see, it’s pretty incoherent, except for this well kept tab of “Things not to do with.”

If you want a better mental library than you have to donate more effort to organizing that Everest sized pile into looseleaf books and tabs.

How well you do this is how good your memory is.

Occasionally, I’ll have an idea where something is roughly located in the Everest sized pile. If you look closely at it, it’s not just one pile, it’s several. Some of these piles represent stuff not important enough to copy down, yet important enough not to throw in the big pile. There are not handy, but with some effort I can generally put my finger on something in this pile by standing around for a few seconds and saying “ummmmmmmm…”

That’s memory.

12

Just out of curiosity guys, why is it supposedly harder to learn as you get older? My dad keeps pushing this opinion on me, and I’m wondering if its truly a physical decline in concentration and memory or just not enough room in your brain to fully recall what you’ve learned?

13

I agree completely with Scylla. I think that we store everything we ever see, hear, learn, percieve, etc… We put it all somewhere in our minds, we just forget how to get back to a lot of it. If you think about how much you have stored in your mind that you can call up from memory, and even all of the stuff you don’t realize that you remember(like the smell of chocolate chip cookies fresh out of the oven), you would be truly amazed. It is like walking through a maze, you may remember everywhere you have been, just not how to get back to that spot.

14

Previous threads where this very question was discussed:

15

So what happens to things you remember? For example, I was bleaching something a few months ago, and the smell triggered a memory from when I was five years old: standing along side the pool at the YMCA, I was helping a friend who just lost a baby tooth into the water look for it. This was hard because the water was wavy from people swimming in the other end.

This is something I haven’t thought of since it happened, over twenty years ago. Does it get stored a second time now that it’s been recalled, or is it more like a video tape that can play more than once?

16

The storage capacity of the human brain is 800 Quadrillion bits (100,000 Terabytes).

Well, according to Star Trek, at least.

Well, actually, according to a second hand report of a study mentioned in a fan website reviewing a Star Trek episode, the human brain is said to have a capacity of 3 terabits. (About 350 Gigabytes.)

All of this probably has the scientific veracity of swinging a dead cat over a stump at midnight. So take it with a grain or two of salt.

17

The sense of smell has a very interesting connection to memory. The olfactory bulbs are located in a different part of the brain than the other “sensory processors”; why this is, we don’t know. However, the phenomenon you mentioned is well-known; many people experience very vivid associations in response to particular smells. I’m sure there are hypothesis on why this is (and, in fact, it could be a key to understanding access to long-term memory), but I don’t have any offhand relevant cites.

18

Essential reading on this topic are these two books.

In particular, “elaborative encoding” (to use Schacter’s terminology) which helps signify memories that will be converted to long-term memories, depends on attention resources deployed during the event and shortly after, when the event is still in short-term memory. IOW, focus close attention on things you want to remember, while they’re happening.

Your brain does not store pixel-like “JPGs” of your visual stimulus. Visual perceptions and recollections are constructed on-demand based on categorization. This observation is derived from neuroscience reading and err… experimentation. If you spot ‘rules’ in new stimulus that gel with existing patterns in memory of prior stimulus, chances are you will rmember the new event much better (This also leads to what Schacter calls “sin of bias”). Memory is contrary to general experience, an inexact device, with recall dependent on heuristics, rather than exact storage and retrieval.

I just realized this post is off-topic, oh well.

19

To elaborate: Let’s imagine a scene that you might remember. For instance, your Aunt Martha is sitting in a rocking chair, holding your baby sister. A computer would remember that scene by tabulating “This pixel is color 13A6F2, then this pixel is color 15A6F3, then this pixel is color…” and so on. It’s really easy to say how many bytes that is.

But human memory works differently. With human memory, you’d have something like "OK, there’s a rocking chair in the picture. What’s a rocking chair look like? It looks like a normal chair (insert shared mental model of “chair”) with certain modifications from the standard (insert mental model of modifications which make a chair a rocking chair). And this was probably Aunt Martha’s rocking chair that she keeps in the family room, so that has these particular properties (insert properties of Martha’s specific rocking chair). Now, we have Aunt Martha sitting in that chair. What’s she look like? Well, she’s human (standard model of human appearance), and she’s an old woman (apply “old” and “female” templates to human model). And she has her hair in a bun and those distinctive dimples (apply customizations “hair in bun” and “dimples”, with the dimples being of the specific type “Aunt Martha’s Dimples”). Now, she’s holding a baby (standard model of human baby).

So with human memory, even though there are an awful lot of pieces which go together to form that image, most of those pieces are used in many other images, as well. You can use the same basic model (human) for your Aunt Martha and for the guy who tried to mug you yesterday, just applying different customizations. This has advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, it’s a lot easier to make associations between different scenes. If you also have an image of Aunt Martha cooking dinner, you can easily tell that it’s the same person in both scenes, whereas to a computer, that would be nearly impossible. On the other hand, it’s easy for human memory to be fooled. What color was Aunt Martha’s hair in that rocking chair scene? Well, your current model of Aunt Martha has grey hair, so that’s what you remember. But it so happens that at the time that picture was taken, she was dying her hair. A computer wouldn’t be fooled by that (if it recognized “hair” in the first place, which it probably wouldn’t).