Question on the human brain.

[Gat Pelsinger]

Quite off topic of a question but I guess this is what this sub forum is for.

 

Randomly had this thought and I am eager to solve it.

 

Does the more data your brain hold, the harder it gets to learn more? And what is the limit on how much a human brain can learn?

 

I got this question because in my place, we have to learn 3 languages. The local, the country, and the universal language (English). But you lucky Americans and British only need to learn English. Of course, now it is not a problem because we have been learning them since childhood, but because we are able to easily speak fluently in these languages without even thinking, we are obviously using more storage in our brain than others who only learn a single language.

 

I am putting more emphasis on language, because it is not just your normal data that your brain stores in the bulk storage, it uses the "language centers" in your brain, which is equivalent to hardware acceleration in a PC, who would have thought.

 

So we are obviously using more of this valuable computing resource, so shouldn't it be harder to learn more and have this part of our brain handle more? 

 

Another similar question I have is how much data can your brain practically hold? The brain's operating system has a clever memory management system. It deallocates the data that is not referred to for a very long time (I swear god programmed my brain in Java). But that is for holding raw information. If you "learn" stuff, you brain can hold it for a longer period of time, just like learning a language. I wonder how much data can my brain learn in this way.

 

Sleep is an important factor as well. It moves data from your short term memory to the long term memory and compresses it. But I wonder how much can this long term memory still hold?

 

If all this so, would I be able to blame for making me learn more languages at the cost of slow learning? 

[Stahlmann]

You already made a similar analogy, but again, this is probably the simplest way to understand it: Your long-term memory is a big capacity, but slow hard drive. Your short-term memory is a small capacity SSD cache. But if the cache is full, the oldest data will be overwritten with newer data. So, to keep as much data as possible intact, we need time to store the cached data away.

 

From my experience, people never stop learning. Learning gets harder the older you get, since the short-term memory, your cache, gets smaller. That's why older people forget stuff more often. But I don't think any human has ever reached a point where their brain simply cannot hold any more information on top of the stuff they already learned. And it's not like we can willingly forget information to free up space either.

 

So, as far as I know, the amount of information you retain doesn't impact the rate at which you learn new stuff. Your age, genetics, level of intelligence and hundreds of other factors probably have a much bigger impact.

 

Being actually interested in what you're trying to learn is probably the biggest factor of them all. If you're simply not interested, you probably won't retain the information anyway. It doesn't matter how many languages you speak or how much celebrity trivia you know.

[wasab]

Don't consume substances that kill your brain cells and your brain will have enough capacity to last a lifetime. Unlike other cells in your body, your neurons cannot be replaced. Once they died, that's it. You lost your neurons. 

[Gat Pelsinger]

28 minutes ago, wasab said:

Don't consume substances that kill your brain cells and your brain will have enough capacity to last a lifetime. Unlike other cells in your body, your neurons cannot be replaced. Once they died, that's it. You lost your neurons. 

bro what are you talking about ? I am not talking about the health of my neurons rather the psychological capacity.

[goatedpenguin]

On 4/1/2024 at 2:07 PM, Gat Pelsinger said:

I got this question because in my place, we have to learn 3 languages. The local, the country, and the universal language (English). But you lucky Americans and British only need to learn English. Of course, now it is not a problem because we have been learning them since childhood, but because we are able to easily speak fluently in these languages without even thinking, we are obviously using more storage in our brain than others who only learn a single language.

As you get older your brain degrades simple, the expansion of the human brain in terms of knowledge and languages is more than we can comprehend. And to respond to this sentence I quoted, American public school students are required to offer usually Spanish, French, or Japanese. If they don't they can't get into college. For brits, they HAVE TO learn a language till year 9, they usually offer French, (European) Spanish or German. I suggest instead of making claims like this you actually do your due diligence and research. 

[wasab]

13 hours ago, Gat Pelsinger said:

bro what are you talking about ? I am not talking about the health of my neurons rather the psychological capacity.

you are talking about the brain which is purely neurological. psychology is related to the mind, completely separate things. neurological diseases are completely different from mental illness. former is something seriously wrong with your physical body, latter is emotional state, e.g. depression/anxiety even if there is absolutely nothing wrong with your body. 

 

neuron is a cell that carries eletrical signal. the neurons that exist and created from your childhood to adulthood are the only ones you get. they will live as long as you live, assuming you dont consume drugs and alchohol which kill them. they wont grow back so take care of brain neurons 

[Kilrah]

On 4/1/2024 at 11:07 PM, Gat Pelsinger said:

Another similar question I have is how much data can your brain practically hold?

Given some people can speak 10 languages fluently AND have 3 doctorates in highly complex subjects while others can barely carry out the simplest of tasks - that'd be extremely variable.

 

On 4/1/2024 at 11:07 PM, Gat Pelsinger said:

Does the more data your brain hold, the harder it gets to learn more?

Finding out whether it's the case or not would be pretty much impossible. Either we'd need to understand a lot more about how things work first or we'd have to observe large groups of people that have been evaluated as having the same rough capabilities and log every single thing they do/learn/experience in their life for decades, while also eliminating a whole host of factors like diseases, environment, bad habits...

[dogwitch]

2 other neat things

is the brain has a base code. that can ether side of the brain can default to if really damage.

another interesting thing is

are brains

while driving or moving around

process and dump a lot of useless data

check out this page on ai car driving data.

https://blogs.sw.siemens.com/polarion/the-data-deluge-what-do-we-do-with-the-data-generated-by-avs/

 

lastly

are brains process 2 forms of data with are eyes.

the color amount(which itself use a massive amount of data going to the brain and the larger less bandwidth black and white which is how we general view most of the world. at any given point.