>>Can anyone here answer a question I have.
>>I was wondering what would happen to the brain if a way was found to halt
>the ageing process. By this I mean prolonging life for ever, barring
>accident, murder or suicide. I am not in any way knowledgeable about the
>science of the brain, so forgive me for my mistakes, but I believe that the
>brain cannot keep learning forever and also that brain-cells die and are not
>replaced, while other cells are. This being the case it seems to me that if
>we could 'live forever' after a long enough time we would simply become
>vegetables as our brains lose their ability to think.
I have been researching a parallel question. One, from my reading, it would
take centuries, maybe even a few millennia, of constant learning before brain
space would be used up.
I myself would like to know the basis behind this conclusion, since only this
conclusion stated in comparable ways is what I've found, not the research to
back it up.
It is the research that I am particularly interested in. One interesting
quote, the most promising I've found is:
"...we now know, through the work of Dr. Mark Rosen[z]weig in Paris, that even
if your brain were fed 10 items of data (each item being a simple word or
image) every second for 100 years, it would still have used less than one-tenth
of its storage capacity."
--Buzan, Tony. "The Mind Map Book." p56.
Does anyone know how I could get Dr. Rosenzweig's research, either in a book,
findable in a medical library (I live near Albany, NY. What would be the best
place to go around here for medical research?) or online without having to go
through a bajillion misses?
Also, I remember reading in the newspaper a while ago that the old "truism"
that neurons don't grow more is a mistake; there was evidence of increased
amount of neurons I think in the hippocampus, but please don't quote me here,
my memory is tentative on the details.
A tentative hypothesis: even if at a given point of time all room for making
synaptic connections in the brain are used up, does the brain have a mechanism
of automatically "rewiring" old, hardly used, and weak synaptical connections
in response to present learning/attention?
If anyone has information on how to get Rosenzweig's research or other research
(I'm looking for specifics!) about the information capacity of the brain,
please email me:
Socratisa7 at aol.com
Socratisa
