Obviously currently this doesn’t happen, but assuming there would be some techniques or devices for learning more – would there be a limit to how much our neural networks in the brain can store?
In: 802
Yes and no. Your brain is a pattern matching machine. If you learn a fact, you will retain this pattern 100% correctly only for a short time. Over time, any patterns you learn will be absorbed into larger patterns and can therefore become incorrect unless you retrain the original pattern regularly. This is why people who read something, often repeat it incorrectly or with poor understanding later, because they’ve integrated something into their existing patterns and it has become altered by those pre-existing patterns.
The reality is, your brain has essentially no storage capacity for actual hard data in the sense of “1+1=2”. That would take a memory larger than the Universe to store your life’s experience. However, you have a massive capacity for patterned data and you can re-pattern this data continuously forever. You will forget specific patterns almost immediately, but the created patterns are what make you “you”.
As to “how much can I learn in a lifetime”, well that is variable but we can look to history for some guidance. Humans who existed before books were common (i.e. a secondary storage mechanism outside the brain), could generally remember enough to live their lives and some could remember things like plays and stories that they would tell to each other or on stage. Generally, by the end of ones life, one will remember only snippets of what happened over the course of ones life. This suggests that our brain storage size is really quite limited in comparison to the demands of our life span.
Latest Answers