48
Meet the woman who cannot forget
(www.rnz.co.nz)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
48 points (94.4% liked)
Psychology
319 readers
6 users here now
Come talk about psychology and related disciplines.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Does the brain even have the capacity to remember everything since your birth? I expected forgetting to be a space saving mechanism
I think it's more about preserving sanity and keeping survival resources available. You don't think about last year's fight with your neighbor so you can focus on potential dangers in the moment. I believe the storage capacity of the human brain is theoretically unlimited in the timespan of a human life.
Interesting. But still, memories from your whole life would probably take up 100x-1000x what you currently remember, does your brain really have that much free capacity? Although I imagine the mechanism of only paying attention to the memories that are relevant could work even then
Your brain seems to actively forget almost everything before age ~4 and most things before age ~7. The phenomenon is known as childhood or infantile amnesia. It’s possible to retain memories from those ages just very unlikely. I think trauma and strong emotions make them more likely to be retained.
There are several theories why but we don’t really know. It’s possible these people have that shut off.
Honestly I wonder how many GB (or whatever the equivalent is for neural networks) the average person's long term memories take up.
Yeah almost certainly. Forgetting is an adaptive mechanism, probably not concerned with space. The brain is finite of course, but I imagine other parts of your consciousness would fail before you ran out of “space”