Is their a limit of what the human brain can learn?

[Tab]

Is their? What if you became a professional student and went to college for the rest of your life? Or if you took to simaller majors CE and CS... Is their a limit to knowledge that you can obtain?...

Could you even measure the memory in the human brain by Gigabytes?

 

[GoHAnSoN]

i guess the amount of data we can remember is prolly few Mbytes.
if you are talking the potential max capacity of a brain, i guess it's infinity.

 

[Barnaby W. Füi]

A few megabytes isn't very much.

 

[thelordemperor]

The brain isn't nearly as precise as a computer.

If you remember a picture, you don't remember every colour of every pixel (or eyeball folicle thing) you have a general impression and when you think of it your brain builds the details.

I don't think it can be quantified, logically there is a limit but I've not heard of anyone suddenly not being able to learn more because their brain was full.

Perhaps the brain is evolved to be able to hold so much that you cannot fill it up in one lifetime.

 

[TStep]

Interesting question, here are a few links on the subject:

Memory
Abstract Functioning
Another
Another
Myth Buster

I think the bottom line is that it cannot be directly compared to a PC in anyway.

 

[Mday]

There is a limit. And, no we cant find what the limit is. It's like counting the number of cells in your body. You can't.

 

[halbe]

And how do you know when you've hit the limit?

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: Mday
There is a limit. And, no we cant find what the limit is.

That's a self-contradictory statement.

The brain, being a physical structure with a finite size and finite storage density, must have a limit to the amount of information you can store in it. I don't see why you couldn't make some educated guesses as to how much information that might be (sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke estimated about a petabyte, FWIW). However, it would be very difficult to know if we were *right* with our current level of knowledge of neurological function, especially since it's very hard to see exactly how the information is stored (for instance, visual information is likely stored more as relations of shapes, rather than pixel-by-pixel as on a computer).

It's like counting the number of cells in your body. You can't.

Again, this statement seems awfully one-sided. It seems to me that if there are a finite number of cells in your body, you can at least get *close*.

Halbe: And how do you know when you've hit the limit?

That's an interesting question. In certain types of computer neural networks, if you oversaturate the network, it suddenly falls apart -- it becomes incapable of sorting out *any* of the information you've programmed into it. Others would simply start 'forgetting' data that hadn't been reinforced in a while. I'd have to guess that the human brain would fall more on the 'graceful degradation' side -- you'd likely start forgetting things that you hadn't used recently. But our capacity for information storage seems to be large enough that it is essentially impossible to use it all up within a lifetime.

 

[wacki]

Originally posted by: GoHAnSoN
i guess the amount of data we can remember is prolly few Mbytes.
if you are talking the potential max capacity of a brain, i guess it's infinity.

If you don't know, say you don't know. Don't make things up.

The truth is, nobody knows. The human brain is something that scientists know relatively very little about. And when it comes to reasoning , we know next to nothing. The human brain consists of about 1 trillion nerve cells. This is about 20,000 times more that the mere 55 million transistors in a Pentium 4 Northwood. But relating transistors to Neurons isn't that simple either. Neurons are do not behave like transistors and are capable of performing operations far more complex than a transistor. It is difficult to guess how much more powerfull a neuron is than a transistor, as not all of the mysteries are solved, so I will not delve too deeply into that subject. Also the human brain is not wired to perform exact operations like a CPU. It is configured to behave more like an analog device. The human brain is very good at doing "sort-of" operations which is why we can use "Hey that looks like" or I feel" or "I'm not sure". The current CPU's are good at doing exact operations but fail miserably at "sort-of" operations. That is changing, however, as there are a handfull of professors/researchers that are working to develope a anaolog computer. These computers will not use programs written in C, Java, or Perl. Instead they will be configured at conception. Analog computers are able to subtract or add any two numbers very easily with only 2 transistors. However, their answer won't always be right, but it will be close, much like a human being.

 

[wfbberzerker]

Originally posted by: Matthias99

Originally posted by: Mday
There is a limit. And, no we cant find what the limit is.

That's a self-contradictory statement.

The brain, being a physical structure with a finite size and finite storage density, must have a limit to the amount of information you can store in it. I don't see why you couldn't make some educated guesses as to how much information that might be (sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke estimated about a petabyte, FWIW). However, it would be very difficult to know if we were *right* with our current level of knowledge of neurological function, especially since it's very hard to see exactly how the information is stored (for instance, visual information is likely stored more as relations of shapes, rather than pixel-by-pixel as on a computer).

It's like counting the number of cells in your body. You can't.

Again, this statement seems awfully one-sided. It seems to me that if there are a finite number of cells in your body, you can at least get *close*.

Halbe: And how do you know when you've hit the limit?

That's an interesting question. In certain types of computer neural networks, if you oversaturate the network, it suddenly falls apart -- it becomes incapable of sorting out *any* of the information you've programmed into it. Others would simply start 'forgetting' data that hadn't been reinforced in a while. I'd have to guess that the human brain would fall more on the 'graceful degradation' side -- you'd likely start forgetting things that you hadn't used recently. But our capacity for information storage seems to be large enough that it is essentially impossible to use it all up within a lifetime.

contradictory statement, eh? well than is an electron a particle or a wave?

 

[Cogman]

the electron is a partical silly , Now the Photon, is that a partical or a wave . Anyways, I think that the brain does not remember data exact data like a computer, but instead changes acording to situations. Yes some data is retained, some argue that all data is retained but the recovery is nearly impossible. Anyways its very hard to say how much the brain can retain in Mb as the brain does not work in ones and zeros (a bit, on or off) but instead works according to other cells touching it.

 

[Cogman]

Ohh, And it is very true that some human brains are larger then Other, I got to hold one (the biggest in my group ). So I had the biggest brain.

 

[Falloutboy]

the brain seems to have a finite space to store information other wise you would be able to remember every day of your life like it was yesterday. the brain "deletes" unimportant details about thisngs to make room for more information thats the way I see it atleast.

 

[Peter]

Is their a limit of what the human brain can learn?

Apparently.

There. Not here.
Their. Not my, not your.
They're. They are.

 

[Kondik]

The capacity is maybe infinite but who want to learn whole life? Some people maybe got only 5 kB of memory and some maybe 50 MB

 

[DrPizza]

Originally posted by: Cogman
the electron is a partical silly , Now the Photon, is that a partical or a wave . Anyways, I think that the brain does not remember data exact data like a computer, but instead changes acording to situations. Yes some data is retained, some argue that all data is retained but the recovery is nearly impossible. Anyways its very hard to say how much the brain can retain in Mb as the brain does not work in ones and zeros (a bit, on or off) but instead works according to other cells touching it.

electron can also be considered to be acting as a wave.

 

[NewBlackDak]

The brain doesn't store data. It makes connections, and learns patterns.

 

[GoHAnSoN]

Originally posted by: NewBlackDak
The brain doesn't store data. It makes connections, and learns patterns.

yes, so just pretending everything is in ascii, i belive human can store roughly like few Mbytes only.

 

[tinyabs]

I guess I'm too old to take DHA and Omega3 to aid my brain's development now.

Memories are capped at a capacity for most people; few are photographic. If you want to improve your capacity, you can take some medicine to improve neuron firings. I know a doctor who prescribe medicine to himself to improve his brain.

We learn some and forgot some at any point of time. We don't remember details but only patterns.

 

[jhu]

of course, as we age we have less neurons than we did when we were younger.

 

[dnuggett]

Again, this statement seems awfully one-sided. It seems to me that if there are a finite number of cells in your body, you can at least get *close*.

Apparently Biology is not your forte. There area finite number of cells in our bodies, but that number changes radically every second. The variance would too huge to be *close*. The other guys was right, you can't get close at the time you end counting. You can approximate.. but you have no idea if you are close or not.

 

[dnuggett]

Originally posted by: Falloutboy
the brain seems to have a finite space to store information other wise you would be able to remember every day of your life like it was yesterday. the brain "deletes" unimportant details about thisngs to make room for more information thats the way I see it atleast.

Then why study anything. Your statement seems to say that the brain has an instant memory upon contact. You know that isn't true, the brain generally remembers from repetition, and then generalizing information as time goes.

For example if you put a rebate in the mail tommorrow (Sun) and I asked you Monday when you mailed it, you cold fairly easily say Sunday the 8th. If you call the rebate company 6 weeks later and they ask you the same question, you would most likely forget the exact date, maybe progressing to the point that all you are sure of is that you mailed it.

 

[glugglug]

It depends on the human.

In most cases nowadays, the limit is zero.

 

[CTho9305]

Originally posted by: GoHAnSoN

Originally posted by: NewBlackDak
The brain doesn't store data. It makes connections, and learns patterns.

yes, so just pretending everything is in ascii, i belive human can store roughly like few Mbytes only.

Given that you have billions of neurons, with thousands of connections each, I'd say you're most likely off by a few orders of magnitude. It's hard to quantify "knowledge" in bytes, though.

 

[glugglug]

A few megabytes is not enough to be fluent in a single language.