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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, Interesting) by KGIII on Thursday June 04 2015, @09:51PM
The strange part is that I thought this was already well established science? I recall an hour long documentary on the Science Channel with Morgan Freeman (I forget the name, I do not care nor normally watch television) where this was discussed. I have heard this in a number of other documentaries. I have read this at various sites years ago. The brain does not get full to the point where it is incapacitated - it deletes stuff before that happens which makes room for more junk to be stored. This is similar to a self-truncating flat file database only it includes meta tags so we can reference it and it has a self-building cloud tag, which is nice but not so accurate when you get to be old like me.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."