Does human memory ever "fill up"?

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Any storage device for any computer ever made can only hold so much data. Sure, it's many orders of magnitude higher than it was in the 90's, but it's finite nonetheless.

Surely there must be a limit with human memory as well? Is there any chance that I could get a "disk full" in my brain in my old age? Or else it's forced to forget stuff to "free up" space? I've always thought most forgetting happened because either it wasn't properly encoded in the first place (like I'm almost certain happens to me with names) or simply so the mind isn't overwhelmed with information at any given moment.

we do replace old stuff with new stuff.

Very interesting question, and after a bit of poking around on Google I found this:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/artic ... y-capacity

It states;

"Yet neurons combine so that each one helps with many memories at a time, exponentially increasing the brain’s memory storage capacity to something closer to around 2.5 petabytes (or a million gigabytes). For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows. You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all that storage."

It goes on to say that comparing human memory directly to gigabyte storage is difficult, but I think it's safe to assume that we're able to hold on to vastly more information than we could ever actually require.

Memory fades - if you don't keep remembering something regularly, you lose it.

I can vouch for that. Thirty years ago I learned Russian to intermediate level. However I've not used it since and I can hardly remember any Russian now. Oddly, the French I've subsequently learned seems to have also overwritten the Russian to a certain extent too - so if I try to think of the Russian word for something the French word for it pops into my mind instead.

I believe in the memory as something which do not sit in brain but is more like a cloud where all humans, animals, nature etc. both living who has lived and who will live are stored. So the limit of it must be the limit of the world. The brain mechanisms thought, whose job is to present to us the right memories to the right times (for shaping our present) may be impaired, and that may be the reason memories seems to fade; they do not fade but our brain mechanisms whose in control of them make them for different reasons inaccessible. Despite that I find it likely that they may turn back and be accessible in dreams.

A limited amount of space can only hold a limited amount of information so yes it does. Now if your brain was infinitely large, then maybe not!

Yes, which is why we forget things.

True. But it is possible we have more capacity than we can use in a lifetime.

ruveyn

Brains don't store everything in perfect detail. It only stores certain aspects of situations where importance is judged by the brain based on factors like how often it occurs, how big it is, etc. Therefore you have actually only stored a cloudy mush of information and whenever you want to recall something in more detail, your brain uses imagination (the creation of memory) to interpolate between its stored aspects. The more you repeat something, however, the more details are actually going to be stored, and the less imagination is needed to complete the picture.

Memories of real things are stored the same way as fantasies are. There are no difference between them apart from the source. What your brain does best is comparision, so it uses it to its full potential. To decide if a memory is real or a fantasy, it compares it to everything else it has stored. The more memories it matches with, the more real it is considered. Other than that, the brain has no way to decide what's real and what's not.

Not likely, I'd say. If I could memorize every word from every book ever written, there would still be plenty more to learn . Not to mention, the fact that our minds so easily forget information that is in disuse or that is unimportant to us tells me that it likely evolved that way in order to save the storage space for the more important bits of information.

Perhaps. Our storage works at the molecular level. There are lots and lots of molecules in our brains. The faultiness of our storage and recall is not necessarily related to capacity . Think of a very large disk storage device with intermittent errors in storage (write errors) or reading (read errors). The errors occur because of some random perturbation, not because of some need to "dump" data to make room for more. However what you say surely is possible.

ruveyn

longterm memory is stored in synapses, which are essentially connections between neurons (nerve cells), and it is formed and retrieved via a specific pathway of neuronal activity through those connections. the human brain has about 100 billion neurons. calculate the number of possible network connections and even if you only consider local connectivity in a subpopulation of neurons and about 7000 synapses per neuron on average you end up with almost infinite memory, because the bottleneck in this is not the theoretical memory space but the usage of stored information. neuronal networks are dynamic, that means if we use a certain pathway the activity of the cells forming a synaptic connection makes that connection stronger and if we do not use a certain pathway the synapses along that pathway get weaker in order to optimize our memory and the usefulness of data we are dealing with, in other words: use it or lose it, and since we cant make use of all the information we ever learned all the time we sometimes have trouble remembering stuff. as a kid i have been told repeatedly to read less because my head would be full at some point, but as long as lifetime is limited there is really no reason to be concerned.

If we developed technology that allowed us to stop aging and live indefinitely, what would happen when our brains got filled up with memory? Would we simply lose the ability to learn anything else? That would be kind of scary.

We might still be able to learn new stuff, but at the expense of losing stuff we already learned or stored in our memories. As it is, even with normal memories that do not fill up and our very finite lifetimes, we still forget or are unable to recall many little details.

ruveyn

The less you store in your brain, the faster time appears to go. The older you become the less you store in the brain because you're not interested. "Been there, done that."