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Has 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
by deciplex 11y ago
Has 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.