Sherlock Holmes once gave the opinion that the human brain has a fixed capacity and that when new information is encoded then old unused information is automatically lost. Even though this was Conan Doyle's fictional take on the matter I took this to be a fairly serious assertion. It seems obvious to me that the human brain has a limited capacity and therefore when it becomes full it seems evident that in order for new data to be stored then old data must be lost.
There are others who say that humans only use a small fraction of the brain's capacity. This is absolute nonsense. Only when the way that the brain works is understood can this idea be posited one way or the other. The human brain is an almost literally unfathomably complicated structure and it's quite possible that we are simply not capable of understanding how it works let alone be able to derive the workings through science.
Is it possible to say when the brain is full? I don't think so. The capacity is not a function of the number of neurons or connections, but of the integration effects and higher order interactions that take place because of the number of neurons and connections. These mechanisms are still unknown to scientists. In my view it would be possible for two individuals to have the same mental capacity, but with a significantly different number of brain cells.
I'm mentioning this stuff because until recently I was going along with Holmes's idea and not only lamenting the gaining of knowledge due to the commensurate loss of data, but actively trying to filter the knowledge gained in order to retain the info I have already. I was struggling to remember things occasionally and put this down to a combination of tiredness, age and an almost full brain! This seems silly now. I guess I hadn't really thought about it too much. I now don't think I have reached my mental capacity. I still have some serious confusions, however I put this down to causes other than there not being enough "space left"!
The best way to remember things is to strengthen the memories by methods such as repetition, referencing and stress. These are partly described by Cognitive Rhetoric which is a field in which I have particular interest, but that's a topic for another post.
On the same tack, and to use the rhetorical device of Reductio Ad Absurdum, I could say that my brain would be more receptive to new information if I were to remove some old data. If I were able simply to clear out the memory pathways of things I don't care for any longer then that would surely allow them to be used anew for stuff that I now want to remember.
Unfortunately this absurd reduction isn't practical. I can't unremember things easily. The best way to forget something is to not recall it for some length of time, but by recalling it it strengthens the memory so I can't know what has been forgotten - I just need to keep focussed on the things I care about and hope that those old memories just fade away.
I believe that this happens all the time. Our minds don't keep a very good track of the memories we have so when some drift off it's almost as if they were never there in the first place.
There's a feeling that people sometimes experience that we call redolence. It's not the dictionary definition - which is more olfactory - but by explanation I would describe it this way: an other-worldly experience of remembrance or reminiscence similar in its indescribableness to Deja-Vu and triggered often by smells and music.
I experience this quite often. Perhaps I smell a particular odour and instantly a part of my brain is set into action and interacts pleasurably with my mind in order to bring back a memory or moment in time. It's a lovely feeling. There are also some songs that do exactly the same thing although slightly more contrived, e.g.
Emma's House by The Field Mice,
If I could Shine by The Sweetest Ache
Most of Dire Staits' first album or Making Movies
Certain songs of David Bowie, Space Oddity, Fame, Young Americans
Many songs from Big Country's first two albums
These are songs that I listened to in my early teens and I guess they stuck. When I play Down to the Waterline or Espresso Love by Dire Straits I'm instantly transported back to myself at the age of 13 playing ZX Spectrum computer games with my brothers.
I was recently experimenting with a BBC B BASIC emulator. I was typing a very simple BASIC program into the screen copied from the INPUT magazines. I completed the program, typed RUN and pressed ENTER. The program worked nicely. I was then faced with the dilemma of how to go back and view the program. Without thinking it seemed like my brain told my mind exactly what to do. A strange and uncanny feeling came over me like something had been dredged up from a dark corner of my memory - and literally it had - I hadn't typed the LIST command into a computer for about 20 years. That particular data had lain dormant all that time, taking up space in my brain and suddenly popped back up for air and shocked me into the line of thinking I'm on with this post. What other dark and dusty corners of my mind will be resurrected next? It's a little scary.
What I take from all this is that the reorganisation of my brain is what's important rather than the particular content at various fixed points. I can't do much about the memories I keep, but I can do something conscious about the way it's organised, linked and cross-pollinated.
As human brains evolve over the next centuries it would be surprising if they don't become more aware of the influence of memories and thereby become more aware of the data stored therein. I imagine a brain of the future to be much more self-aware and more logically interconnected. Perhaps a new lobe will appear that will deal with the organisation of memory. A mechanism that can recall specific memories more precisely than now would only benefit the lucky individual who had that mechanism. I would argue counter to that idea, however and say that that individual would perhaps lose out on the experience of redolence I describe above. I value logic and precision, but perhaps humans aren't supposed to be too mentally robotic. It would be a gradual change of course, and my prejudices of how humans are "supposed" to be would be invalid in a society that is based on high technology and logic.
A better solution (perhaps I mentioned this in a previous post) would be to understand the integrations and processing of information in the brain so as to define a translation mechanism to that other great medium for information manipulation - Silicon! I imagine a future where the precise action potentials, inter-synaptic neurotransmitter mechanisms and other communication methods are understood at least in sensory areas of the brain so that a silicon-based transmitter and receiver can be placed in the loop. This may be able to receive signals from the brain at various points in order to create a direct output. Similarly the module could transmit data directly into the brain to produce experience not before possible.
The technicalities of the interface are relatively trivial compared with the deciphering of the data. How is information actually passed around the brain? How can this information be Typed so that it can be stored in Silicon? I believe that it's possible to do this.
Someone wants you to watch their home movies. You press a button that wires their signal directly into the optic nerve pathway to your brain (or more likely it would need to be pre-integrated and fed directly to the Occipital lobe) and hey presto! you're experiencing their home movie effectively first hand.
Obviously this is not my idea. Writers and dramatists have been conjuring this trick for a long time (the Black Mirror recent Channel 4 series on TV dealt with it nicely, if trivially in "The Entire History of You" by Jesse Armstrong). I am, however, very interested in the mechanism by which it might work. How can we translate a feeling into a dataset? The method that I think will work is an ontological one. By defining an ontology the domain can be modelled in a dynamic and flexible way. The key to making it work is to define the Entities and Relationships cleverly. The entities and relationships that I can imagine right now are probably not the ones that will eventually be employed in these devices of the future - I cannot understand because the neuroscience, cognitive science and psychology have not yet brought forth the entities and relationships that are universal enough to capture both the deep processing of our brains and the universal truths of our perceptible universe.
In the meantime I will endeavour to delve into the realm of universal truth if only to skim lightly on the surface tension and perhaps, if I'm lucky, occasionally break the tension enough to make wet my big toe!
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