If you could make someone physically immortal or at least give them longevity far beyond the normal human lifespan, would you eventually reach a point where the brain was “full up” of memories and knowledge? What would happen if that occured? Would we simply be unable to learn new things, would we forget old things, or would you experience a mental crash that reduced us to vegetables? (I’m guessing here, none of these hypotheses is based on medical/biological knowledge).
No one knows. One thing to keep in mind for these types of things is that the human brain is almost completely unlike a computer in the ways that it stores and processes information. They share hardly any similarities at all and what is trivial for one is extremely difficult for the other (adding up 10,000 numbers versus recognizing a happy human face).
There are too many complicating factors such as age limits for people to know the answer to your question. Think about stuff that was once essential to you for long periods of time or former phone numbers and try to remember them. It does appear that the brain tosses out information it doesn’t need as much anymore. More likely, it is an analog process where certain information gets reinforced while other information fades. Meanwhile, computer are just giant on/off switches.
One way the brain may sort and organize data is via dreaming. That’s a popular theory we learned about in a college Psych-101 class. It also might explain why we don’t tend to remember all or even most of our dreams. If we remembered them all, that would simply provide the brain with more junk to sort through during the next night’s sleep. Dreaming may be one of the brain’s methods for “defragmenting,” its hard drive, condensing/deleting/compressing data, et cetera.
Organization notwithstanding, immortality would likely expose memory limits at some point, so maybe data that is unused long enough (or that is of least interest to the specific brain’s owner) might eventually be “overwritten.”
All of which is a round-a-bout way of saying that no one yet knows the limits of human memory. A bunch of terabyte hard drives may rival a typical brain’s number of memory cells, but—as has been mentioned on this and numerous other sites—the human brain is massively parallel, and duplicating its functionality with machines may never be feasible.
The answer to the simple question of whether we will run out of storage space is almost certainly “yes.” If you believe that memories are stored physically in the brain, then it is necessarily true that a finite brain will only hold a finite amount of memories.
However, since memories and knowledge are stored in a sophisticated way, that limit may be quite large. It’s also pretty hard to quantify the storage, since it’s tied up in the architecture of the brain itself. Do you consider the storage capacity of a neural network to be the number of bits required to describe the network map, or the data content of the sets of input recognized by that map?
We tend to flush out information as we don’t need it already. However, that isn’t a binary process like a computer where there is “stored” and “deleted” either. We have “in between” states of memory. You may have no idea of the names of key textbooks you studied in depth for long periods when you were in school. However, if you saw one of those books at a used book sale, there is a good idea that you would recognize it. If you decided to devote enough mental energy to it, you may then be able to recall a great deal about the book and the subject even though you couldn’t even a short time before. It is as if those memories are stored in some fuzzy half-there state but you can actual reconstruct a lot of information if it is needed.
How do you quantify that?
I cannot imagine how one would quantify such a thing. Brain cells do not regenerate. And yet, when a brain is damanged, previously unused areas are pressed into use sometimes. ( Sometimes… ). Would that we could press more of our brains into use under normal circumstances- would that increase our Hard Drive space? Are we wired to handle 100x the data? Not data flow, for that would mean increasing gangliae 100X and neuron firings up the wazoo.
I do wonder if our brains would make excellent use of increased brain useage or if there is a plateau, tied to speed of processing, ability to draw out and …and…what is a fair word- cross-match ideas and bits of memory to produce something?
Or, to use our current lingo, doubling the hard drive doesn’t double the RAM. In fact, depending upon the speed of the CPU chip and speed of rotation of the hard drive, you might slow down your machine ( albeit imperceptibly ) by forcing it to read twice the hard drive area every time a query is presented.
Then, there is Cortical Reorganization.
Snopes weighs in on the "10% of Brain Is Used myth
Cartooniverse
It is kind of like lossy compression. Suppose you take a high-quality jpeg photograph, and then decrease the quality to the point where the subject matter is unrecognizeable. If you give that photo to someone and ask them what it is, they can’t tell you. But then if you give him the left half of the high-quality original, he could match the clear image up to the blurry image, and he may even be able to infer what is in the right side of the photo.
So even though the poor-quality jpeg doesn’t look like anything anymore, it still carries information about the high-quality image. Human memory seems to be the same way. We lose detail to our memories to the point where we can’t even piece what they were about together, but show us a fragment of the original, and suddenly our jumbled memories start to make sense again.
One of the most amazing stories I read about recently is the savant Kim Peek.. He is the 54 year man that inspired part of the story for the movie Rain Man. He was born with whole structures of his brain completely missing including the Corpus Callosum that connects the two hemispheres of the brain.
This physical brain deficit somehow led to his ability to completely memorize almost 10,000 books and recall details like page numbers years later. Unlike most savants, he does process the information to some extent and can interact with people for discussions about topics that he has read.
This type of evidence would suggest that the brain moves information through a series of stages. Perhaps with Kim Peek, information gets absorbed and just sits there where he can recall specifics with ease. For most of us however, some factual information would be retained but most information gets processed into an organized whole that we don’t quite understand and we lose most of the individual bits of information as they are integrated into useful aggregate information like rules of thumb, stereotypes, and abstract ideas that don’t require us to reprocess all kinds of detail when someone say “think of a typical fish”.
This question gets asked fairly regularly.
I have already reached my hard drive limit. As Homer said “everytime I learn something new, its pushes the some of old stuff out” 