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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: 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.
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