Is there a maximum memory capacity for the human brain?

Question

They say that you never forget anything you hear/see, even though you may not be able to bring it into the forfront of your mind, it's still in there somewhere. So is there a limit to how much your brain can remember?

Answer 1

I do not think there is a limit to memory. The brain is still the least understood matter in the universe and with it's physical nature undefined, no concrete answer is possible at this time. Without making any reference to religion or the spirit, I believe from observation that the brains abilities and capacities reach beyond the body. Carl Jung defined the open consciousness (from controlled and scientific observations) which is a place where the thoughts and memories of all people (and to a lower order, animals)coalesce. Where and how this happens I cannot imagine.

I believe the open conciousness is evident from observed telepathy, "other life" recall, the abilities of savants to do what they do and, to the extreme, the ability of a very retarded persons to suddenly and flawlessly play complex musical pieces unpracticed and unexposed.

Whatever is going on, I do not believe that the mind ends in the body and also that our perceived reality is not exactly what it appears. Therefore, I would not limit the amount of memory and overall potential the human mind has.

Added - JRocas you said "A study was done and it came out with this figure for the memory capacity of the human brain, which is on the order of 10^8432 bits. Meaning our brain's memory capacity ranges only in the megabytes level."

Huh? 10^8432 would form terabytes of terabytes of terabytes of megabytes of memory billions and billions of times over. My Ti-89 cannot even comprehend the number and reported the number as infinity.

Answer 2

The brain is truly the most powerful thing that one could possess. If one wants to create a sky, a sea, or anything else, one could easily do it almost effortlessly using one’s mind. The brain is so capable that it can hold both the sky and one’s self with ease.

According to Dickinson in “To Make a Prairie It Takes a Clover,” all that would be necessary to make a prairie would be just “one clover, and a bee, and revery. ty of the sky could be very easily overtaken by that of the brain. The mind’s imagination alone would be sufficient in creating a prairie. It is very evident in her writings that she believes that the mind is a very majestic and magnificent thing which has absolutely nothing to hold it back from going further and further. The brain is capable of retaining vast amounts of information. There is nothing to which the brain can be accurately compared. There are no boundaries for the brain or for its capabilities to create and hold a variety and a large amount of information. There would be no need for a clover and one bee. The mind can create whatever it wishes, whatever it can think of, whether it is a prairie or even whole new worlds. The imagination has endless possibilities and there is nothing that can stop it from thinking and imagining. The brain may seem as endless as the sky, but there must eventually be a boundary to which the sky can go, some kind of end, but the powerful brain knows no limits. There is nothing existing that has as many abilities, as much capability to retain information, or as much imagination.

Answer 3

A study was done and it came out with this figure for the memory capacity of the human brain, which is on the order of 10^8432 bits. Meaning our brain's memory capacity ranges only in the megabytes level.

More so, the number of neurons or brain cells doesn't really correlate to the capacity for memory, rather, it is the amount of connections or synapses between the neurons which dictate the memory capacity for our brains.

Answer 4

According to the multistore model of memory there are three stages.

First information enters the sensory memory, everything from this is lost after 2 seconds unless you pay attention to it.

Information you do pay attention to goes into the short term memory, information from this will last about 25 seconds and it can only hold 5 - 9 items.

Information can be transferred from short term to long term memory. Long term memory is believed to have a limitless capacity, i.e. you will never forget anything that is in the long term memory.

Check out the Science Aid site on this: http://scienceaid.co.uk/psychology/cognition/multistore.html

So it is true what you say, that you never forget anything, but once it has gone into the long term memory. As I have tried to get across; there are a lot of opportunities for information to be forgotten before getting to the long term.

Answer 5

The capacity of the brain for information is infinite. However this only applies to long term memory and many stages must be adhered to to allow the information to be stored such as repetition.

There is a short term memory store however and it is thought by Miller (1956) that this has a limited capatcity of 7+/- chunks of information. It is thought this applies to all indivudals.

Answer 6

Of cource there is. There is a limited number of atoms and molekuls in brain wich code the information, therefore there must be also limited number of information that can be "saved" in the brain. But the memory capacity can be sometimes very large, I watched a documentary and there were people who remembered EVERYTHING they had ever read and experienced

Answer 7

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Answer 8

I don't think so. The capacity of memory in your brain is like the capacity of love in your heart, the space would strectch to safeguard all the love you are capable of & all the memory you deem precious.

Answer 9

no but her is a cool fact, if you downloaded the entire memory of a child about 7 years old to a cray 2 super computer there would be too much for it, but if you forced it into a computer the memory would overload and either shut down or it would try and make room and explode

Answer 10

we only use a very small percentage of our brain. So I think that we have much more space to store information and we won't have any storage space problems in the near future :)

I think that living for c. 80 years is not enough time to fill your brain with information..... there is so much knowledge in the world........ it's mind boggling :S:S:S:S:S