IUBio

Brain Capacity?

John E. Anderson jander at OSPREY.UNF.EDU
Tue Apr 1 15:15:35 EST 1997


Eugene Leitl wrote:
> 
> On 19 Mar 1997, Will Nelson wrote:
> 
> > [...]
> > One of the fascinating features of the human brain is that there
> > is no apparent maximum amount of information that can be stored.
> 
> There is, the outer constraints being computational physics, as the
> Bekenstein limit, the inner, much more stringent ones of what gets stored
> in long-term memory, few 10 bits/s at best. At that rate, it's not easy
> to fill up the storage during a human lifetime.
> 
> > People learn throughout their entire lifetimes, and that learning
> > keeps getting stored in some fashion. There are retrieval problems,
> > but it's all in there.

The conventional wisdom, I thought, is that yes, you can learn
throughout your lifetime, but storing more recent memories can degrade
the quality of more distant ones.  This is based on some artificial
neural network work, possibly the 1982 Hopfield paper in PNAS among
others, but I imagine everyone has experienced it when you try to
remember details of something that happened long ago; I know I have.

JA
--
John E. Anderson
jander at unf.edu





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