Eli5 the brains ability to not run out of “storage”
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In movies they have those evidence boards with different pieces of evidence connected each other with strings. The brain is kind of like that. In ELI5 terms, you can imagine each neuron as an “evidence”, when a new memory is made, strings are attached from one evidence to another, to make a story. Strings in this analogy are the connections that neurons make with each other.
You brain does not run out of space as it stores memories as these connections, and similar to how you can always add more strings to the evidence board, your brain can make new connections.
The caveat however is that, connections that are not reinforced can be forgotten (a better explanation is that the connection is not forgotten or lost, but the existence of that connection is forgotten). With the evidence board analogy, you can think of this like constantly adding new strings to the board. At some point, there will be so many strings in the board that they will start to block each other, and you won’t be able to see the connections at the back. The connections are still there, and if you dig through the strings you can reveal them, but will take some effort to find where they lead to. If you think those connections are important, you can move those strings to the top, which is similar to what your brain does when a memory is reinforced.
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