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Can your brain really be full?
- dang 11y agoUrl changed from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-your-brain-really-be-full/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-your-brain-rea..., which points to this.
- deciplex 11y agoHas anyone who knew what they were talking about every seriously suggested that your brain could "fill up", like a hard disk running out of free space? It seems like the closest you could get to that is your neurons becoming completely static (i.e. not-plastic), unable to form new connections or sever existing ones. That would kill you pretty quickly, or maybe another way to look at it is that it happens to you when you die, so the answer I guess could be "sort of, when you die". But while you're alive? Assuming you don't just "add more space", to continue the analogy, it seems like what your brain does is probably closer to lossy compression, over and over again. And the important bits remain more-or-less readable.
- meric 11y agoIt's like a piece of fabric one could keep weaving on - all the threads that get weaved on will always remain but only visible if it's near the top layer - That's my impression.
- rawnlq 11y agoTo be technical ... from a information theoretical point of view your brain definitely can't hold infinite information so it definitely fills up in the sense you can't possibly be adding information without evicting/corrupting something else. I personally don't think we can reach that point within a human lifetime though. Something more interesting to think about is the limits of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_memory which you probably fill up on a day to day basis.
- sgk284 11y agoThe brain is constantly evicting, shifting, and changing memories as new stimuli come in and change the connectivity of our neurons. In that sense the brain, from inception, is full in the same sense that in an artificial neural network every neuron has a weight. The only thing that changes are the weights. (Note that I realize ANNs are a dramatically overly simplified representation of the brain, but the point remains).
- anotheryou 11y agowhen we don't reach it in our lifetime, why do we have that over-capacity than? The brain already consumes something like 20% of our energy.
- hliyan 11y agoNo more than a neural network can be full. To anybody who has worked with neural networks, the following comes as no surprise: old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form Weights in a NN like the brain would just gradually shift. Older, seldom-accessed information will slowly fade. That said, a NN can suffer from the trying-to-be-jack-of-all-trades, ending-up-an-idiot problem.
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- anon4 11y agoYou could alternatively say that the brain is constantly full.
- reagency 11y agoMore so as you age. As a youth, you have very little total information.
- rndn 11y agoAnother possibility is that two activation patterns are so similar that they interfere and thus they merge, one replaces the other or they both become useless noise. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting#Interference_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forgetting#Interference_theori...
- dingbat 11y agothis sounds like whats happening during an approach that is sometimes used in therapeutic settings: where a patient or client is induced into recalling a memory with negative emotional content, and then guided into transforming that memory by introducing competing neutral or if possible positive interpretations. for this purpose the result isnt useless noise, but instead its useful because the patient or client then experiences less negative pattern matching in daily life. at least thats the idea.
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- danieltillett 11y agoMy brain is definitely full. Every new thing I learn comes at the expense of something else I know (I guess this should be past tense). The funny thing is I still remember when my brain had spare capacity - I used to fill it with arbitrary facts like what page I was up to when I was reading dozens of books at once. When I was young I never read one book at a time or used bookmarks. I would just remember the page I was up to and whenever I came back to a book I just turned to the correct page. Of course now I have to use bookmarks and every book I read is at the expense of some part of my past :(
- gluelogic 11y agoSo you're saying it's a hard number and, one-for-one, if something new goes in, something old goes out?
- danieltillett 11y agoPretty much. Since around my late 20s everything new going in has been at the expense of something old. The only interesting thing is the loss is not a first in, first out system nor is it based on importance. I have retained pointless memories from the past and lost things that were quite important. All I can say is that my capacity is finite and I have reached the limit.
- hellameta 11y agoI'll concede that this might be true - but you most certainly can't validate it based on these descriptions. In fact, by definition, you are unable to forget "something" for every other "something" you learn. In fact - if you know you forgot something - is that not a new piece of information? Now that I'm writing it out I think it's definitely nonsense actually - sorry. As a parallel consider music (a "single" domain for simplicity) - you are implying you can hear a new song and forget an old one, AND KNOW that you forgot an old one(?). You're trolling us for sure.
- danieltillett 11y ago
- anotheryou 11y agoWithout reading the article: of course. Evolution would not allow for much overcapacity. However this will be done through lossy compression (you forget irrelevant shorter term stuff, you forget details, things get abstracted and generalized etc.)
- danieltillett 11y agoNot that I disagree with your premise, but you can only use evolutionary arguments for populations in equilibrium. The human population has undergone so much recent evolution (I actually know of no non-domestic species that has changed more in the last 100,000 year) that you can't use evolutionary arguments like this. There may well be people alive that will never use all the capacity of their brain given their lifespan.
- learnstats2 11y agoI suspect this is wrong, although I recognise your apparent authority in this field. The human population has gone through more well-studied evolution than other populations; but, for example, novel species such as the London Underground mosquito are unlikely to be rare. You may claim that this is effectively a domestic species, but I claim that's just what we can easily study. Human lifespans are not very much greater: chimpanzees live to be 60 years old, and they are 8,000,000-12,000,000 years of evolution away. The difference in average lifespan is primarily due to progress with infant mortality rate.
- danieltillett 11y agoSpeciation and evolution are not directly connected, but this is a minor point. For a population to be in equilibrium the population size has to be approximately constant. The human population (and our domestic species) have expanded so much in recent times that we are not in equilibrium. This means that there are lots of genes of great selective value that have yet to spread through the human population. My favourite is the ApoA-1 Milano gene which basic stops you from getting heart disease [1]. This only arose a couple of hundred years ago and unfortunately most of us don't have it. 1. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApoA-1_Milano http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ApoA-1_Milano
- nodata 11y agoYes, temporarily at least. Flood someone with information and they will stop to make sense of the information they already have.
- mvanvoorden 11y ago"...old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form." Reminds me of this Married with Children episode I've seen ;) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0642312/
- LordKano 11y agoThat's my greatest fear. I'm terrified of the possibility that there could be a day when I hit my maximum capacity and have to forget things in order to be able to learn new things.
- fasteo 11y agoHaving no scientific background and inclined to do computer analogies, I tend to think that our brain works like a RRD database [1], that is, we don't completely discard old information; instead, we store an aggregation of the said information as new information comes in. Then, these aggregations become our knowledge about a given subject; we don't need to store every detail, as this aggregated view is enough to help us understand new information. Of course, if we ever need to reconstruct every detail of old info, we simply cheat, in the confabulation sense [2], possible with disastrous consequences [3] [1] http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ http://oss.oetiker.ch/rrdtool/ [2] http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/02/reconstructing-the-past-how-recalling-memories-alters-them.php http://www.spring.org.uk/2013/02/reconstructing-the-past-how... [3] http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-it/ http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/do-the-eyes-have-i...
- rebelidealist 11y agoCould it be that we consume too much useless information on social media and the internet?
- xellisx 11y agoI'm sure the beer helps "tidy" it up. =)