It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it - there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones." A Study In Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ch. 2, The science of Deduction

1. How much information can we retain? Has it been estimated? The skull is only a certain size. How much can we cram in? Whatever the mechanism of memory, there must be a limit. And evolutionary theory tells us that the capacity should not be wasted, i.e. there should not be capacity that would not be conceived as usable in a reasonable lifespan. Eh?

2. OK, so thoughts are quite quick. But recall would be supernaturally fast if all of the information stored had to be sifted each time to obtain a given item of information. Ideas are permeating around the literature that the all retained information is in a state of constant flux and no mass sifting occurs. Related to the first question above, how far can we go in terms of juggling before we drop all of the balls? After all, we're only human, aren't we?

3. Related to the above, how could a memory chip work? That is a proposed flashable electronic memory device that might be planted in the brain.

I dont think the problem is so much memory capacity as how it is stored. The sub-conscious disposes of memories at a whim, if it finds something that is thought to be a ordinary useless memory, it gets discarded.

Remembering all things all at once is foolish HeyHey, you know that.

Its the same reason why we dont put every action through an entire neural network, we only need to usually use a tiny part of the massive network. To use the whole thing would take up so much brain capacity we would be unable to do anything else when we were thinking.

It seems next to near impossible to "use-up" all available memory in a lifetime because the sub-conscious is an excellent space saver. If memory is paticularly low, it will just delete some older unimportant memories, thus memory is inifinite, even though its finite.

One big problem with augmenting brain memory with a chip is the interface. How do you collect the data and pipe it into the chip (and get it back again when you need it)? This problem is quite hard.

Having all the information immediately available is not the same thing as remembering it. There is a process to access the information. The information could be at a different level of consciousness. This idea of a constant memory flux is not my own, I read it recently but I have forgotten where. Ironical eh?

Not really, its just neuroscience. Scientists were able to take the visual signals from sharks and put it onto a monitor. They literatly saw through the sharks eyes. You do the exact same thing the brain does, recieve the visual signal, feed it through the neural network and get your output. Getting it out I assume would involve some sort of integration with the NN and then it would simply be like remembering any ordinary memory.

Its definatly not a walk in the park, but its also not impossible.

to make room we need to clean house, letting go of unnecessary particles of thought.

I remember reading a paper on memory. In terms of capacity our memory storage is pretty much infinite. However what makes us forget things is the method in which the neural networks are stored and lack of activation of such networks.

.... yes, 'de-activation' of the 'non-relative'.