• Question: can your breins be come full with memories and have no room for any thing else?

    Asked by mrbrains to Ben, James, Jen, Michael, Susanna on 12 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Michael Craig

      Michael Craig answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      Hi Mr. Brains

      No, and this is fascinating as we’re not really sure how or why this happens. It shows just how powerful the brain is if it never runs out of room for new memories. In fact it is so fascinating, people who I work with are part of a huge project worth millions of pounds to try and figure out how the brain remembers so much information so that we can start teaching computers to remember the same way as they only have a limited capacity of memory at the moment. But one day the way computers remember might be based on the way the brain does!

    • Photo: Jen Todd Jones

      Jen Todd Jones answered on 12 Mar 2013:

      I used to think my brain only had a limited amount of space, and anything new I learned would push out some of the old memories! But the brain has a very large capacity for memory, we can live for eighty years and still remember things that happened when we were ten years old! Having said this we know that mostly everyone forgets what it’s like to be a child, this is a special case and we’re still not quite sure why it should be that these memories are lost more easily than others, it’s thought perhaps because our brains change so much during that stage the connections to the memories are lost.

      As far as we know our brains cannot be ‘full’, we may even remember every single thing we’ve ever seen or done, but it’s the connections to these memories that may be what stops us from remembering everything.

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