3 ms·

There is finite space in your brain. If you don't use it regularly it isn't odd to not retain it.

• kragen 5y ago
  The phenomenon I'm talking about is not that people learned how to differentiate functions in college, then forgot, though that certainly does happen. I'm talking about people who never learned to differentiate at all, or never learned linear algebra, or never learned group theory, or never learned complexity theory. And not because they were busily learning something else and just hadn't gotten to group theory yet, but because at some point they just stopped learning things. I'm not convinced of this finite-space theory. I mean, yes, in a physical sense, there's clearly finite space in your skull. But even the synaptic connections outnumber the bits in the textbooks for a B.A. by about four orders of magnitude, and the potential neural DNA methylation sites outnumber synaptic connections by another six orders of magnitude. So I don't think this intellectual stunting is accounted for by space limitations.