If Adam and Eve were not designed to die, what about the limits of the brain and memory? Would they run out of space for memory and then have their brains start to break down (like when a computer when it has very little memory left and starts to slow down terribly)? And what about “after the resurrection” when endless years begin to accumulate? Are there endless memories to come? Researchers are now suggesting that the human brain might actually have an infinite capacity for long-term memory. Infinite? How is that even possible? The answer they give is surprising. This really does change how we look at memory.
From an article in Wired that got me thinking about this:
Big Question: Can My Brain Get Too Full? You remember your first kiss. You remember your childhood phone number, where you parked your car, and the last time you got really drunk. You probably remember the digits of pi, or at least the first three of them (slacker).
Each day you accumulate fresh memories—kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would root for you). With all those new adventures stacking up, you might start worrying that your brain is growing full. But, wait—is that how it works? Can your brain run out of space, like a hard drive? It depends on what kind of memory you’re talking about.
“It’s not like each memory takes a cell and then that cell is used up,” says Nelson Cowan, cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns—circuits of connected neurons. And your brain’s ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well.
Read the rest of the article: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/can-my-brain-get-too-full
Big Question: Can My Brain Get Too Full? You remember your first kiss. You remember your childhood phone number, where you parked your car, and the last time you got really drunk. You probably remember the digits of pi, or at least the first three of them (slacker).
Each day you accumulate fresh memories—kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would root for you). With all those new adventures stacking up, you might start worrying that your brain is growing full. But, wait—is that how it works? Can your brain run out of space, like a hard drive? It depends on what kind of memory you’re talking about.
“It’s not like each memory takes a cell and then that cell is used up,” says Nelson Cowan, cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns—circuits of connected neurons. And your brain’s ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well.
Read the rest of the article: http://www.wired.com/2015/06/can-my-brain-get-too-full
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