this post was submitted on 09 Jun 2024
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Psychology
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Does the brain even have the capacity to remember everything since your birth? I expected forgetting to be a space saving mechanism
Interesting. But still, memories from your whole life would probably take up 100x-1000x what you currently remember, does your brain really have that much free capacity? Although I imagine the mechanism of only paying attention to the memories that are relevant could work even then
Your brain seems to actively forget almost everything before age ~4 and most things before age ~7. The phenomenon is known as childhood or infantile amnesia. It’s possible to retain memories from those ages just very unlikely. I think trauma and strong emotions make them more likely to be retained.
There are several theories why but we don’t really know. It’s possible these people have that shut off.
Honestly I wonder how many GB (or whatever the equivalent is for neural networks) the average person's long term memories take up.
Yeah almost certainly. Forgetting is an adaptive mechanism, probably not concerned with space. The brain is finite of course, but I imagine other parts of your consciousness would fail before you ran out of “space”