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.
There really isn’t a universal definition for information, so it’s impossible to determine if there is a physical limit of information a brain can store. Is “information” even a physical?
If information is physical then it may be limited by the number of neurons in the brain that handles storage of information. If you say information has equivalent mass then maybe the theoretical limit is defined by the mass of a brain. But the brain is a bit more complicated than that, there are electrical signals and different chemicals in your brain and we don’t have a 100% understanding of how the brain functions.
I think the simple answer is that, we don’t know because there isn’t a clear definition of what information is.
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.
There really isn’t a universal definition for information, so it’s impossible to determine if there is a physical limit of information a brain can store. Is “information” even a physical?
If information is physical then it may be limited by the number of neurons in the brain that handles storage of information. If you say information has equivalent mass then maybe the theoretical limit is defined by the mass of a brain. But the brain is a bit more complicated than that, there are electrical signals and different chemicals in your brain and we don’t have a 100% understanding of how the brain functions.
I think the simple answer is that, we don’t know because there isn’t a clear definition of what information is.
This reminds me of an episode of Married With Children where Kelly was on a game show and her brain only had room for a finite amount of info, she learned something new during a break, and the answer to the next question was what she lost in her brain when she learned the new thing. Hilarious drama ensued.
This reminds me of an episode of Married With Children where Kelly was on a game show and her brain only had room for a finite amount of info, she learned something new during a break, and the answer to the next question was what she lost in her brain when she learned the new thing. Hilarious drama ensued.
This is a very difficult question to answer in an eli5 manner, however there is something called the “Bekenstein bound”. This bound describes how much information is needed to recreate the state of a finite region of space, which is the same thing as saying how much information can “fit” in a finite region of space. If you force that finite region of space to contain more information than its Bekenstein bound, that region of space will collapse into a black hole!
So you can see that the idea of a Bekenstein bound was derived using black hole thermodynamics and that is a topic that is definitely not eli5-friendly. However, it can be used to give a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to how many bits of information a human brain can possibly contain before it can collapse into a black hole.
[Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound) is a wikipedia article about the topic and its calculations for a human brain.
According to this article, if you could somehow represent a human brain as a computer, then you would need 10^(7.8*10^41) bits to recreate the human brain. By the Bekenstein bound theorem, this is the same thing as saying that that many number of bits is the maximum number of bits a digitized human brain can contain before it collapses into a black hole. This number is so big that it’s really hard to describe.
Related to the idea of a Bekenstein bound and how much information our brain can store, there are natural numbers (i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) that are so large that if you tried to imagine it, your head would collapse into a black hole. One such number is Graham’s number. Yet, even a number as large as Graham’s number is just as far away from infinity as the number 0 is from infinity.
This is a very difficult question to answer in an eli5 manner, however there is something called the “Bekenstein bound”. This bound describes how much information is needed to recreate the state of a finite region of space, which is the same thing as saying how much information can “fit” in a finite region of space. If you force that finite region of space to contain more information than its Bekenstein bound, that region of space will collapse into a black hole!
So you can see that the idea of a Bekenstein bound was derived using black hole thermodynamics and that is a topic that is definitely not eli5-friendly. However, it can be used to give a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to how many bits of information a human brain can possibly contain before it can collapse into a black hole.
[Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound) is a wikipedia article about the topic and its calculations for a human brain.
According to this article, if you could somehow represent a human brain as a computer, then you would need 10^(7.8*10^41) bits to recreate the human brain. By the Bekenstein bound theorem, this is the same thing as saying that that many number of bits is the maximum number of bits a digitized human brain can contain before it collapses into a black hole. This number is so big that it’s really hard to describe.
Related to the idea of a Bekenstein bound and how much information our brain can store, there are natural numbers (i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) that are so large that if you tried to imagine it, your head would collapse into a black hole. One such number is Graham’s number. Yet, even a number as large as Graham’s number is just as far away from infinity as the number 0 is from infinity.
This is a very difficult question to answer in an eli5 manner, however there is something called the “Bekenstein bound”. This bound describes how much information is needed to recreate the state of a finite region of space, which is the same thing as saying how much information can “fit” in a finite region of space. If you force that finite region of space to contain more information than its Bekenstein bound, that region of space will collapse into a black hole!
So you can see that the idea of a Bekenstein bound was derived using black hole thermodynamics and that is a topic that is definitely not eli5-friendly. However, it can be used to give a back-of-the-envelope calculation as to how many bits of information a human brain can possibly contain before it can collapse into a black hole.
[Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound) is a wikipedia article about the topic and its calculations for a human brain.
According to this article, if you could somehow represent a human brain as a computer, then you would need 10^(7.8*10^41) bits to recreate the human brain. By the Bekenstein bound theorem, this is the same thing as saying that that many number of bits is the maximum number of bits a digitized human brain can contain before it collapses into a black hole. This number is so big that it’s really hard to describe.
Related to the idea of a Bekenstein bound and how much information our brain can store, there are natural numbers (i.e. 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc) that are so large that if you tried to imagine it, your head would collapse into a black hole. One such number is Graham’s number. Yet, even a number as large as Graham’s number is just as far away from infinity as the number 0 is from infinity.
[Bekenstein bound](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bekenstein_bound) limit from a physics perspective:
Scroll to just before the footnotes at the end…
This means that the number O=2^{I} of states (bits) of the human brain must be **less than** ≈10^(7.8*10^41).
Note: This is 10 raised to the 7.8*10^41 power, where for comparison a terabyte is 8*10^(12), and a googol is 10^(100). Or in long form, 10^(780,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) bits.
Latest Answers