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The brain is truly a marvel. A seemingly endless library, whose shelves house our most precious memories as well as our lifetime’s knowledge. But is there a point where it reaches capacity? In other words, can the brain be “full”?
The answer is a resounding no, because, well, brains are more sophisticated than that. A study published in Nature Neuroscience earlier this year shows that instead of just crowding in, old information is sometimes pushed out of the brain for new memories to form.
Previous behavioural studies [PDF] have shown that learning new information can lead to forgetting. But in this study, researchers used new neuroimaging techniques to demonstrate for the first time how this effect occurs in the brain.
http://theconversation.com/health-check-can-your-brain-be-full-40844
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Insightful) by KritonK on Thursday June 04 2015, @01:09PM
"The answer is a resounding no."
Except that the article describes exactly the opposite: Old memories are erased, to make room for new ones.
Except that the article also hints that new memories are sort of blended with similar older memories, and stored alongside with them with higher precedence.
So, the answer is actually a resounding no, yes, or maybe. I think I knew that before reading the article!
(Score: 2) by francois.barbier on Thursday June 04 2015, @01:39PM
Extension to the "Betteridge's law of headlines", known as the "KritonK's law of headlines and articles":
Any headline that ends in a question mark above an article containing "The answer is a resounding no", can be answered no, yes, or maybe.
(Score: 2) by morgauxo on Thursday June 04 2015, @02:21PM
That sounds like a hard drive partition with compression. Then add a process that deletes lesser accessed files kind of like how Linux can start killing processes when RAM gets low.
(Score: 2) by mr_mischief on Thursday June 04 2015, @03:42PM
So it's a deduplicating LRU cache with retention priority scoring for the contents? Got it.
So, what's the car analogy?
(Score: 2) by Ryuugami on Thursday June 04 2015, @03:49PM
So, what's the car analogy?
Can the leaky gas tank in a car get full? The answer is a resounding no, yes, or maybe.
If a shit storm's on the horizon, it's good to know far enough ahead you can at least bring along an umbrella. - D.Weber
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Thursday June 04 2015, @07:44PM
>Except that the article also hints that new memories are sort of blended with similar older memories, and stored alongside with them with higher precedence.
I like to think of it as re-compressing memories. For example, if you have 1 MB of memory A and then gain 1 MB of related memory B, your brain just lossily "compresses" them into 1MB of memory AB, making some of the details fuzzy but you can more or less recall the main points of both A and B.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @08:12PM
Except that the article also hints that new memories are sort of blended with similar older memories, and stored alongside with them with higher precedence.
So basically brains use a sophisticated lossy compression mechanism.