Is There A Limit To Memory?

Unlike digital cameras, which cannot save more photos when the memory card is full, the recording capacity of the human brain never seems to decrease. But it is difficult to perceive the unlimited recording ability of the human brain.

Neurologists have long tried to measure the brain's capacity. However, the cognitive skills of people who achieve incredible things with their memory offer surprising results.
Most of us have difficulty memorizing even a phone number, let alone a number with thousands of digits. However, 24-year-old Chinese university student Cao Lu broke the world record by memorizing 67,980 digits of pi in 2005.
Some geniuses can remember everything, from names to dates, to the smallest detailed and complex visual information. Rarely, healthy people can become this way after an accident. After being hit on the left side of his head with a baseball bat, 10-year-old Orlando Serrell began memorizing countless car license plates and telling which day a date from decades ago fell on.
So how can these people exceed the memory capacity of the average brain so much? What do these facts tell us about the true capacity of the human brain?

Train the brain

Our memory capacity depends on the physiological structure of the brain. The brain consists of 100 billion nerve cells (neurons). Only about a billion of these play a role in long-term memory; these are called pyramidal cells. If we assume that one neuron corresponds to one unit of memory, our brain should be completely full. Psychology professor Paul Reber states that memory is not a large capacity as many as the number of neurons and that it will fill up quickly. Therefore, researchers believe that memory occurs in the connections between neurons. Network-like connections originating from each neuron reach thousands of other nerve cells. Reber points out that in this way, memory capacity increases greatly and opens up "tons of space". So, are the brains of people with extraordinary memory capacity also extraordinary? No. People like Lu, who memorize pi, say they are normal, just training their brains to remember selected information.

Memory palace

U.S. Memory Champion Nelson Dellis says he had a very bad memory before he became prone to this issue, but that changed with practice. “After a few weeks of training, you start doing something that seems impossible to the normal person. However, we all have this talent,” he says.
When Dellis started brain training years ago, it took him 20 minutes to memorize the order of a deck of playing cards. Today, it does this job in 30 seconds. But for this, he does memory exercises for five hours a day.
One of the tested methods Dellis uses is to build a “memory palace.” For this, he envisions a structure he knows very well. He thinks of the things he wants to remember as images and arranges them on the table next to the door in his dream. Then he moves to the kitchen table etc. “In your dreams, you enter that building and express the images you left there as things you have memorized,” he says. Pi number memorizers use similar methods, such as “memory palaces” or turning a string of numbers into a sentence of a story.

Connected thinking

The widespread success of these memory strategies fosters the idea that anyone can do it if they put their mind to it. But can this be done without devoting so much time to brain training? Allen Snyder of the University of Sydney is aiming for this. He says that with the right technology, it is possible to reveal “the knowledge within us”.
According to Snyder, the human brain operates through connected thinking, not with unimportant small details. “We are aware of the whole, not the parts that make up the whole,” he says.
For example, in one experiment, he asked subjects to memorize a shopping list of automobile parts, and they all mentioned the word "automobile" to him, although he never mentioned the word "automobile" to them. “They put the pieces together and made the whole,” Snyder explains. In other words, many of the data that our senses transmit to the brain do not actually reach consciousness.
However, in gifted people, this high-level connected thinking aspect does not come into play; so they remember countless details. For example, while remembering the shopping list, you can check the lights, wipers, windshield, etc. one by one. they remember; Based on these, they do not immediately cling to the automobile connection.

Data download speed

Based on the example of Serrel, who was transformed by a stick blow to the left side of his head, Snyder tried to find out which part of the brain functions in remembering countless information. The frontal temporal lobe above the left ear was a candidate for this. In autism and giftedness syndrome, this region was dysfunctional in dementia patients with acquired artistic skills.
Snyder notes that when he temporarily blocked the neural activity in this area of the subjects' brain, there was an increase in their ability to draw, count, and find mistakes. Although some researchers are skeptical of these data, interest in stimulating the brain is increasing. Reber from Northwestern University makes the following analogy about the brain: “The limit of human memory is not related to the hard disk capacity of the computer, but to the speed of data downloading. The problem is not that the brain is full; "The reason is that the speed of information coming to it is much higher than the recording speed of the memory system."