Can a person's head run out of memory?

In the age of information technology we are used to the fact that any information must occupy a certain amount of memory. And since memories are information, they must sooner or later fill the amount of memory in a person's head.

But the human brain is not a hard drive where you can write information in free blocks. The process of "writing" information into the brain occurs by making connections between neurons and creating neural networks. Every time we remember some past event, we activate neuronal connections connected with it. We can say that having a finite number of neurons (according to approximate estimations, about 100 billion cell nuclei), a finite number of connections can be created inside the brain. And this means that human memory has its own limit. However, each neuron can be simultaneously involved in a huge number of connections, which become more and more complicated with time. It is believed that one neuron can participate in a maximum of 1000 connections. So our head can store a truly enormous amount of information. No human being will ever be able to fully exhaust all possible neuronal connections in his lifetime.

The human brain contains about 100 billion neurons, each of which can form up to 1000 connections

While calculating memory capacity of human brain some specialists operate with familiar to us megabytes and gigabytes and determine the value of a million gigabytes of human memory. But it is likely that we cannot, in principle, measure memory capacity in terms we are accustomed to. If only because we do not know how much memory human memories occupy.

It is likely that when the number of neural connections reaches enormous values, we will not see the warning "memory shortage" before our eyes. We will simply find it more and more difficult to "retrieve" memories by accessing complex neural connections.

Comments

You must be logged in to post a comment.