Eli5 the brains ability to not run out of “storage”
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One of the primary functions of memory is to forget things and toss them away. Your mind is constantly bombarded with information from sight, sound, touch, and taste. The bulk of this information is generally useless so it’s discarded. But it will hold onto things that are deemed important like skills you need to survive as your brain will prioritize things that can keep the body as safe as possible.
we do run of storage. what brain does, imho, is it distils the memory to retain its’ main points and discards details, then extrapolate the details when the memory is recalled, so we do halucinate time to time.
It is believed that there are 100 billion neurons in each human brain. Each memory is a unique sequence of neuronal firings. That offers a wide variety of potential situations in which new memories might be created. When we consider that we are continually optimizing the memories which are most essential, pruning the less important ones frees up neurons to store new information, our capacity for memory quickly grows.The average person’s memory is somewhere around 2.5 petabytes. That’s enough time to watch nonstop 1080p video for nearly 300 years.
I don’t think mine is limitless.
I can’t remember anything from when I was less than 3 or 4.
And bugger all from the things that happened more than 10 years ago.
I mean, you don’t remember every single detail of your life. Your brain decides what’s important and tosses the rest, sometimes you forget stuff over the years (sometimes over a couple of minutes) and your memories change and condense into smaller less detailed versions of the same events. Sometimes they even change completely like two people will experience something but remember it slightly differently. The human brain is much more complex than any hard drive. This isn’t really an explanation, just wanted to point out depending on how you look at it sometimes your brain will “delete” or “compress” memories to make room for other stuff.
Well imagine it’s like a box full of fruit. You fit a lot of fruit in it but over time the fruit underneath starts to go bad and you have to replace it. It’s not that the brain runs out of storage, it’s just that the content inside gets replaced once it deems that it doesnt need to store it anymore.
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