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

[gutharius]

Do lysosomes exist in fat cells?

 

[Drayvn]

What about a quantum computer, do u think thats fast enuf....?

 

[Drayvn]

Sorry double post

 

[Ariste]

The human brain really cannot be equated to a hard drive or a CPU. If you try to find out the storage capacity of your brain, the number becomes mind blowingly huge. Every time that you walk from your computer to your kitchen, your mind is simultaneously controlling trillions of cells, telling each and every one what to do to allow you to walk, taking in unimaginably high-res video and rendering it in real time, then interacting with the "video" to tell you where to walk so that you don't bump into a wall. Behind all of that, the mind is controlling the beating of your heart, your breathing, your digestive system, and performing maintenence on anything that needs healing, which requires control over even more trillions of cells to all fit into the larger system. Aside from all of that, you are also remembering exactly which way to go and every time that you see something and recognize it, your mind is recalling detailed 3d blueprints in full color of every single step of the way. You are also feeling the air interacting with your skin and the ground interacting with your feet, and your mind is processing all of that information to tell you exactly what is happening and what it should feel like in real time. While you are walking, you may be thinking of what happened that day, recalling what you were doing at every moment of the day and making decisions about what you should to tomorrow based upon what happened that day.

For all of that work, how hard is it to walk to the kitchen?

The computer is billions of times more powerful than any computer today. Yes, a computer may be able to store exact data, but other than that, what can a computer do that we cannot do millions of times faster and better? Just imagine how unimaginably complex a simple motion such as walking is. When you are walking, your mind is controlling billions of cells, telling each one individually what to do to fit into the larger motion, deciding which place and angle is best for your foot to go to achieve it's goal, all without recieving code from a pre-written program to tell it how to do so. The mind can react and adapt to fit the situation at hand billions of times better than any computer on earth.

If you want to try to equate the mind to a computer, look at a robot and how "smart" it is. It may have the most powerful computer chip in the world, but there's no way it is going to be able to function normally in a society. The most powerful computer chip in the world cannot even come close to the human mind.

 

[Gord]

Originally posted by: Ariste
Yes, a computer may be able to store exact data, but other than that, what can a computer do that we cannot do millions of times faster and better?

Calculus.

 

[gigapet]

MY CPU IS A NEURAL NET PROCESSOR, A LEARNING COMUTER.

 

[KoolAidKid]

There are several current models of memory that don't really have storage limits at all. Even the concept of "storage" doesn't really apply. I think that trying to draw parallels between computers and brain function is often counterproductive, especially when thinking about memory.

Think of the brain as a piano. A pianist bangs on the keys, and because of the way the piano is tuned, music comes out of it. You would not say that music is stored in the piano. The question "how many songs could a piano hold?" is a ridiculous one. A piano has 88 keys, and yet can output an infinite variety of music.

Memory quite possibly works in exactly the same way. Information from your senses, etc. stimulates your brain. Because of the way the brain is configured, these inputs cause the brain to output what everyone calls memories. They are not actually stored in the brain at all, but arise as a result of a particular set of cues.

From my point of view, the brain is nothing more than an extremely complex machine. If you have a perfect knowledge of the inputs and a perfect representation of the function of the brain, then you can predict behavior with perfect accuracy. Of course, we are very far from achieving this.

 

[reallyscrued]

i dont think we can think of this digitally, in bytes and such. I believe that memory and the brain is all anolog, its just "there". Like an infinate amount of VHS tape, but instead of magnatism, we have neurons. plus everything on a computer uses compression, its not like we know the compression our brain uses. "We can land on the moon, see billions of lightyears away, but we still dont know wuts in our own heads" -By Me. and what about photographic memory? autism?

 

[Sk8orDie]

i was under the impression that the brain remebered everything exactly as you saw it, you just can't recall those memories becuase it would overwhelm you if you were able to remember every instant of your life.

 

[spectrecs]

It's my belief that the human brain remember's just about everything it takes in. It is just a matter of how well we can retrieve that information. Think of it this way: if I told you to just remember and write down everything from your past, you would probably have a short list in comparison to your life. But, say you smelled a scent that reminded you of a place you used to know... there, by that smell, just unlocked even more memories that you thought you forgot. You guys get what I'm saying? Different methods can get access to different memories.

 

[Farvacola]

It seems pretty obivous to me that the brain has a finite number of neurons and brain cells, so the amount of data we can absorb is finite as well. But, whether or not we as humans can utilize that is another question entirely.

 

[KoolAidKid]

Originally posted by: Farvacola
It seems pretty obivous to me that the brain has a finite number of neurons and brain cells, so the amount of data we can absorb is finite as well. But, whether or not we as humans can utilize that is another question entirely.

This statement makes tacit assumptions about the structure of memory that are IMO unjustified. Why should the number of neurons in the brain have anything to do with storage capacity? Going back to the piano analogy in my earlier post, do you think that adding another key to a piano would allow it to "store" more songs? Even if the piano has only two keys it can output an effectively infinite variety of music.

Even if you think about memory in terms of associations, connection strengths, etc., increasing the number of neurons does not necessarily mean an increase in capacity. A single pair of neurons has a nearly infinite number of possible connection strengths.

The only answer to OP's question at this point is that we don't know enough about memory to be able to answer it. If there is a limit to memory capacity it has not yet been reached. I find it hard to imagine what would happen if you reached a limit, anyway. Would you just not be able to process any new information at all? Seems unlikely. Would the brain somehow choose a memory to remove to make space for the new material? This seems even less likely.

 

[Spinne]

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.

Sorry, everything behaves as both a wave and a particle. Even the Earth exhibits a wave-particle duality. Electron-microscopes use the wave nature of the electron to probe structures smaller than photons can probe.

 

[itachi]

if what you're asking is whether or not there's a limit to the complexity of the stuff we can learn.. then yes, there is.. the universe holds many secrets, but just as the universe is finite.. so are the secrets it holds (might as well be called infinite). at one end of the spectrum, that's our absolute max. however, that's not really a limit of our brain rather the universe.. and i doubt we'll ever get that far. by that time the Apocolypse will have already come (or whatever it is that your beliefs say).

the human brain is constantly evolving.. our brain learns how to learn, giving us the capacity to learn the more complex, abstract, and intuitive. think about it like this.. isaac newton is one of the most famed mathematician and physicist of all time. he's the father of calculus and most of the basic fundamentals of physics. he spent most of his life deriving the laws and equations, known and learned by many, after the apple fell from the tree when he was 23. however, if he were still around today.. he wouldn't be seen as the genius he was. the stuff that he spent his life deriving, we learned in a year or less. all we needed to learn was how to use it, not how to derive it.. that's how the future generations will be.. few of us will spend our lives deriving a solution to a complex problem/question (the rest, like me, lack the intelligence).. and sometime in the future.. the lifelong work of those few will become a 2 hour lecture in college.

if what you were asking is if there's a limit to how much a brain can learn (subsequently, how much a brain can remember).. then that's a tough one. if you take infinity to mean limitless, then no.. it isn't. if you take it to mean immeasurably large, then you're stuck in the gray area for an answer.

in general though.. stuff you learned or experienced recently gets stored in the area with the shortest path (unless you drink religiously, in which case that area is probably dead already).. the stuff you'd rather have forgotten or don't care to remember gets pushed back further and further to the point where you wouldn't be able to remember it even if you tried.. if you can't remember, it doesn't necessarily mean that it's been forgotten completely.. but how would you know what your brain has and hasn't forgotten entirely, when you can't even remember the stuff that hasn't been discarded?

 

[PsharkJF]

itachi brings up a good point, if we could theoretically learn everything in the known universe, would we be able to remember all of it with 100% clarity? I doubt it.

edit: it's one of the advantages of having 6 billion people - you only need know 1/6Bth of the entire truth =)

 

[willfreund]

I dont know about you guys but when I press del when entering my brain basic input output system I get a bad image file

 

[KoolAidKid]

Originally posted by: PsharkJF
itachi brings up a good point, if we could theoretically learn everything in the known universe, would we be able to remember all of it with 100% clarity? I doubt it.

edit: it's one of the advantages of having 6 billion people - you only need know 1/6Bth of the entire truth =)

There is a difference between storage and retreival.

 

[Farvacola]

Originally posted by: KoolAidKid

Originally posted by: Farvacola
It seems pretty obivous to me that the brain has a finite number of neurons and brain cells, so the amount of data we can absorb is finite as well. But, whether or not we as humans can utilize that is another question entirely.

This statement makes tacit assumptions about the structure of memory that are IMO unjustified. Why should the number of neurons in the brain have anything to do with storage capacity? Going back to the piano analogy in my earlier post, do you think that adding another key to a piano would allow it to "store" more songs? Even if the piano has only two keys it can output an effectively infinite variety of music.

Even if you think about memory in terms of associations, connection strengths, etc., increasing the number of neurons does not necessarily mean an increase in capacity. A single pair of neurons has a nearly infinite number of possible connection strengths.

The only answer to OP's question at this point is that we don't know enough about memory to be able to answer it. If there is a limit to memory capacity it has not yet been reached. I find it hard to imagine what would happen if you reached a limit, anyway. Would you just not be able to process any new information at all? Seems unlikely. Would the brain somehow choose a memory to remove to make space for the new material? This seems even less likely.

What I said was not an assumption. Memory as we know it is stored and contained in the brain as neuron cells and connections, and to be quite honest, even when it comes to subatomic levels of space, there is always a finite amount of space.