Hi, I’m breaking a big rule from Usenet but then again this is a web message board not Usenet.
Posting in IMHO because I’m pretty certain this doesn’t have a factual verifiable and citable answer and would be mostly theory.
Is there a physical limit to human memory in the same way there are limits to computers before they have an integer overflow? I’m not really asking if the human brain can be measured in exaflops or yottaflops but if a person was able to live forever without forgetfulness might there be an upper limit to the number of their memories and how vivid the recall may be?
Pardon me, again, for being all over the place and I beg your kind indulgences.
It’s very likely that no one knows.
I think I used to know this . . . .
I’d guess there is a physical limit. I’m told that memory has a physical basis, and with a finite amount of space in one’s head, it would follow that there’s a certain limit to how much one could remember.
Yeah, but most human memory isn’t “verbatim.” It’s a vague chemical soup, neuron, synapse related dream that we take for reality. Sure, you can remember 3 PIN numbers, 16 passwords, and your SIN number, but all of those childhood memories are Xeroxes, of Xeroxes, of Xeroxes, of Xeroxes, that have been floating somewhere in your brain and are about as reliable as the drunk witness to a murder scene.
Ray Kurzweil theorized that the human brain has a capacity of 10 trillion bits. IIRC, it was first in The Age of Intelligent Machines, but here’s a google book link with the same claim from The Singularity is Near. Of course, the two aren’t really comparable that way.
Heinlein resorted to having Lazarus Long originate a method of memory organization to expand capacity (I don’t recall the book title, but I think it was an anthology of Lazarus Long stroies).
Less fictionally (for the most part, anyway), in The User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders discusses how part of being conscious is forgetting, relating it to Maxwell’s demon and Shannon’s information theory. My memory of that book is tenuous at best; I don’t recall whether he gave a quantity of any sort.
Bottom line – I doubt there’s any meaningful measure (much less a precise one) to use for your question, and it’s even less likely for there to be an answer. Although I do have to wonder if, a la Kurzweil, one might come up with a bitrate estimate for the central nervous system, which might lead to an upper bound of information processing over an average life span. It’s not clear to me how one would incorporate a person’s “inner life” into it (e.g., memories of thinking about things). Besides which, if Tor is right, there’s some pretty hardcore and unknown form of compression going on.
Interesting question, though. IIRC, Shagnasty was a neuroscience grad student awhile back. Perhaps he’ll respond with some better information…
I don’t know, but at my age my brain is down to about 512K. :mad:
There are stories of savants who remember EVERYTHING about every day they’ve lived, but usually at the cost of other mental capacities. That’s one big database of info.
Some theories state that everybody remembers everything that ever happened to them, but it’s hard to retrieve some of it. We’ve all had the experience of suddenly remembering something from long ago that we hadn’t thought of in years.
I think you could retrieve anything you ever experienced with the right trigger.
People in the past used to remember TONS of stuff, before reading and writing could be assumed and when books were really expensive. Those Italian Renaissance merchants had memory palaces to “keep” all that stuff in their heads.
HA! Mine is a full 640K, which ought to be enough for… something…
I don’t even think that the metaphor of the brain and memories as a hard drive storing files is at all an accurate picture of how memory and the brain actually work. So I don’t see how we can quantify the “storage space” in terms of Gigabytes or whatever.
Isn’t current scientific understanding of retrieving memory akin to a painter painting? It’s not: “Access the first time I kissed Meagan”… “Retrieving”… “picture loaded!”. It’s more like a set of experiences and “objects” are smashed together in order to re-create the memory from scratch. So when I think of the first time I kissed Meagan, the “painter” in my head begins with her lips, their softness, etc like colors on his brush, and starts to paint the picture a new.
Details like whether it was sunny or raining are more likely to reflect my current mood/imagination than reality.
Time Enough For Love
As for memory, i doubt its really possible to put a number of gb or tb on your memory. They barely even know how memory works at all.
There’s two kinds of memory: the “painting” kind and the verbatim kind. Kids are more likely to remember verbatim than adults. Linky.
My 65 year-old uncle wrote down the wrong account number at the bank one time…what he “remembered” was the serial number of his rifle from boot camp 45 years earlier.
*Originally posted by * Cutter John:
Slipstick Libby invented the memory techniques following Lazarus’s prompting in Methuselah’s Children.
New system certainly needed 