Eli5 the brains ability to not run out of “storage”
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Our brain is NOT like a video camera that’s always on, storing a perfect record of what has happened. It is still a big open question of how we store information, but we do know that the brain is very efficient at using the same regions to encode many pieces of information.
One way it does this is breaking the information apart into ‘features’ and building up information/knowledge out of common features. Like it doesn’t store ‘red’ separately for every red object, it just links to the same feature ‘red’ when it encodes different memories with that feature. Do this for a whole bunch of features (including basic sensory ones but also more complex concepts/thoughts/emotions/etc.) and you can encode HEAPS just by recombining the same features.
Another way it does this is by being selective in what it takes in. We’re not built to take in a ‘perfect record’, we’re likely built to take in what is useful to our lives and goals (or what has been useful through our evolutionary history). So anything related to our safety, belonging, health, interests, or anything that we experience repeatedly is more likely to be stored as ‘knowledge’ in our internal model of the world.
A final note is that our brain likely builds a ‘predictive model’ of the world, based on our past experiences. This means that when we experience things, we’re not taking in all the information from scratch, we’re already living in our ‘mental model’ and the new sensory information is just updating that model. That means when there’s a ‘good enough fit’ between incoming information and our mental model, our brain isn’t doing much work to store anything new, it’s basically just going ‘yup, fits the model’. When there’s a mismatch or surprise between what we experience and our mental model, then it updates the model. That means we’re not storing every incoming piece of information separately, we’re just continually building on our existing internal models of the world.
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