[Eli5] Human brain can store 2.5 Million Gigabytes of memory. how many years of memory a human brain can hold in a man(Assume he’s immortal)?
In: Other
Scientists don’t know exactly how all the different kinds of memory are encoded in the neurons, but it’s certain that the process is much more complicated than, say, filling up a hard drive. Probably some neurons participate in many different memories; probably there are elaborate schemes for forgetting useless memories and for coalescing similar memories; and probably many other complicated mechanisms are involved that we haven’t even thought of yet.
In any case, it’s likely that the whole system would collapse after some number of centuries… simply because it wasn’t designed for that! (Or maybe it was, I don’t know.)
Memory is a lot more complicated than that. Its not like a picture or a video.
Its more like a puzzle. Different parts of your brain sort of “save” the way your brains neurons acted whem the actual event happened.
So lets say you go to the park and watch a bee land on a flower, then it flies over and stings you.
When it happens, you experience it because neurons in your brain behave a certain way.
Neurons in your visual center react and form what you see; parts of your brain react and create the sensation of pain from the sting or the bee crawling on you; some form the smell of the flowers. Etc.
Then later when you remember it, those same neurons do almost the same thing, but with the helpmof part of your brain that helps you imagine things.
So it takes the actual feeling and makes a sort of simulation of it, where you don’t actually feel or hear or see it as if it actually happened, but you do sort of experience it again.
When people say the brain can store a certain amount of information, its a very vague example to give you an idea of how much information your brain processes and holds on to. But theres no real way to actually put it into hard numbers.
Theres also really no way to know if memories ever actually disapear, because unlike a video file on a computer, a memory isn’t readily available when you need it. Sometimes we forget. And forgetting doesn’t mean its nessisarily gone forever.
For example, sometimes younforget a persons name or such, but remember it later. This is because the information was always there, just not readily usable.
Imagine a dirt road. You walk the same path for many weeks or months and over time, a little groove forms thats easy to see.
But then you get a car and you stop using that trail and over time with 4ain and such, it washes out and becomes very faint.
Similarly, your brain keeps these pathways of neurons and using it more often forms a deeper groove, making it easier to rememebr. With less use the pathway becomes more faint, harder to recall.
Lastly, unlike a video, this isn’t a perfect copy of what happened. Its a simulation, a reinactment.
Every time you use a memory, your brain can add new information and metadata to it.
For example, you kiss your girlfriend for the first time. At the time, it feels nice, you like her perfume and you feel her soft lips and you feel happy.
You remember it later and its similar to how you experienced it.
Then later you have a bad break up, she cheated on you, its bad. And you remember it while you’re bitter and angry about it. You maybe remember it differently, her lips weren’t soft they were dry and chapped. Her perfume was overbearing and bothered you.
And your brain takes how you feel now, the neurons in your brain regarding your anger and such, and adds that to the memory, and now the memory has an angry feel to it.
And every time you access it, it changes just a little, adding new info.
A video will always be the same.
The brain’s potential storage is unlimited. When the brain learns “a thing”, it tends to tidy up behind itself and reclaim that space.
For example, we all learn the alphabet, but few remember how we learned it – the process is complete and the brain has done a tidy up.
Tell me everything you’ve done over the last 24 hours. And I mean everything. Describe everything. The colour. Positions. Exactly what you said. What everyone around you said. Etc, etc, etc.
You’ll notice that you can’t. You can’t even remember one day. Chances are you can’t even remember most things from 5 minutes ago.
So how many years of memory can a human brain hold? None. It just remembers tiny little tid bits from here and there, enough for you to think you can remember things.
Latest Answers