So biological garbage collection pauses then? skip sleep, and the brain tries to run gc cycles during runtime. Causing attention and performance latency spikes. Evolution wrote the original JVM.
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Every memory your brain has ever produced is still there, even if most are beyond conscious access. Memories quite literally become a permanent part of you.
A lot of people mistakenly think of human memory as a sort of hard drive with limited capacity, with files being deleted to make room for new ones. It's very much not like that.
If you just mean that human memory has a finite capacity that's much larger than anyone has come close to reaching by storing the memories of a normal human lifetime, that might make sense.
Do you have any references for your statements about memory? I'm not familiar with whatever science there is in this area.
Memories seem to be constructed by a group of neurons together, and it seems clear that neurodegeneration is a thing, whether by trauma or due to aging. When pathways degenerate, maybe you have a partial memory that you brain can help fill the gaps with(and often incorrectly), but that does not make it the original memory.
If you have questions about my comment, I'm happy to try to explain myself better
"I didn't understand you at all, so you must have meant either A or B" is not the way to reach an understanding
The way I understand it, it's just that, unlike on disk, the deletion process is not binary. Weak connections that are not revisited regularly gradually become weaker, until they're undistinguishable from noise (false memories).
I don't know where I got this trick. Likely some survival show or some novel. But I don't have any background in survival, otherwise, I would have brought a lot more water.
So my brain knew there was a memory that could help and made up a dream about it is my theory.
True, but it doesn't really detract from his statement because do we really know what that upper bound even is? I don't think we come close to the theoretical storage limit... So saying "every memory you have is permanently stored" is effectively true, at least true enough for a thought experiment like this. Perhaps when people live to be 200 years old and we know more about the brain we can test this, though.
I used to be weary of learning new, complex things, thinking I'd "lose" old knowledge XD
I didn't ask for that. I asked if you have references for what you said. Even if I misunderstood you, that shouldn't be a reason for you not to give references for your statements, if you have them.
If you don't have any references to back up your statements, then I'm not sure what you're basing them on.
It is almost certainly false, but it doesn't require infinite storage to be true.
Consider an exponentially weighted moving average - you can just keep putting more data in forever and the memory requirement is constant.
The brain stores information as a weighted graph which basically acts as lossy compression. When you gain more information, graph weights are updated, essentially compressing what was already in there further. Eventually you get to a point where what you can recall is useless, which is what we would consider forgotten, and eventually the contribution of a single datapoint becomes insignificant, but it never reaches zero.
Which would put it into the category of the second part of my comment--which the person I was responding to said was not relevant to what they meant.
It implies enough capacity to store everything. But what you describe is not storing everything.
> lossy compression
Which means you're not storing all the information. You're not storing everything.
> When you gain more information, graph weights are updated, essentially compressing what was already in there further.
In other words, each time you store a new memory, you throw some old information away.
Which the person I was responding to said does not happen.