How much can the brain remember?

Question

When you forget something, where does the thought go?

When you just thought of something and forget it the next second, what just happened? I mean, you just thought of it.

How much can the brain really remember? Is it really the brain that remembers things?

When someone says "burn or kill a brain cell", does that mean you are forgetting things?

What do brain cells do exactly? Where is the memory stored?

If someone was to have a brain transplant, would they have the same thoughts and feelings as they did before?

I'll be looking forward to your answers and learning some new things! Thanks a lot guys I appreciate it.

Answer 1

In theory your brain has limitless storing capacity, you just need to find a way to dump all raw data you input via all the sensory organs into longterm memory. There's some people that have managed to do this, usually they have a brain problem though.

I put a link below to a man who can read with both eyes(one eye reads the left page, one eye the right page) at the same time and remember 98% of it all. It's utterly fascinating.

Our brain is an adaptive organ, if we need to remember spacial directions for instance(like if you drive cab all the time and need to know the city well), the part of our brain that stores that info will grow.

As for what happens when you think of something and forget it the next second, chances are that you started thinking about other stuff. Usually you can regain your thought by going back through the steps that led you to it. Like in a conversation. This is, I think, because we cannot store every single little thought, or more precisely the thought is a part of you working through the world, it's perceptive I guess, like vision, so there's no point. It's not information but more of an information buffer, plus it's more part of communication, not memory.

As for killing braincells and losing memory, that's sort of what happens with some Alzheimers patients. Your brain deteriorates and your brain function starts to decline, and you lose memory among other things.

As for transplants, if you transplant your brain into another body, you'll have a new body. Think of your body as a car and your brain as the driver(the heart's the engine, the stomach the fuel tank etc), if you move the driver into a new car, it's still the same driver. In other words your consciousness isn't transferable into a new brain, again you'd just be switching drivers so your body would have a new person at the helm.

I've included a link to Alzheimers and Memory through Wikipedia, read up more on it, it is really neat.

Hope this helped.

Answer 2

Well........... it might depend on which political party one belongs to, seems the Dems have forgotten 9/11, amongst other things. To honestly answer your question, the brain is nothing more than a big computer just like the one your using to post to Answers. The human brain works with electricity. In its simplest terms a brain stores information in cells, it writes and retrieves information using electrical pulses. When people are healthy these electronic pulses are strong and the neural pathways are clear. As people age the electronic pulse weakens, the neural paths become less efficient, and there are even short circuits which cause issues like parkinsons deisease. No, if they were able to transplant the brain of Charles Manson into you, you essentially become Charles Manson, the brain contains the ID or personality of the person.

Answer 3

You remember everything you ever learned.

It is just the matter of recalling it that is difficult. The less important your memories are to your current situation, the more deeply they are archived and the more difficult it becomes to retrieve that data at a later point. Some information becomes so deeply entrenched within your mind that it is effectively beyond any hope of natural retrieval..... but it is still there. Under hypnosis a lot of those hidden memories can be retrieved far more easily.


The brain can remember a hell of a lot.... We're talking definitely several terrabytes worth of data storage..... but unfortunately the human mind tends not to have much RAM.... and is poorly organised.

Answer 4

When a brain remembers something it sometimes only lasts for ninety minutes. For others their brains are like sieves because they haven't got the fundamental flaw in what it takes to remember things. Some people remember a lot of things, some remember a few things and others just remembered about what has happened today and can't remember what happened yesterday or even last week.