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posted by cmn32480 on Thursday June 04 2015, @01:01PM   Printer-friendly
from the bud-bundy-was-right dept.

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


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @08:12PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 04 2015, @08:12PM (#192252)

    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.