• Question: How much memory can an average human brain remember before you forget?

    Asked by tszyninja25 to Fiona, Jane, Joanna, Michelle, William on 22 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Michelle Murphy

      Michelle Murphy answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      I dont think storage space is a problem for the brain. People tend to forget if the dont use the information regularly which is why revising is helpful for exams.

    • Photo: Joanna Brooks

      Joanna Brooks answered on 16 Jun 2010:

      For immediate memory research has shown us that the answer to this question is 7 plus or minus 2 items. So if you give people the following sequence:

      4, 7, 61, 9, 2, 41, 33, 15, 7, 78, 33, 50, 1

      they will be most likely to remember five to nine numbers. Try it with your friends!

      But if you are talking about long-term memory then it can be endless!

    • Photo: Fiona Randall

      Fiona Randall answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      That’s a really good question but I don’t think anyone actually knows the memory capacity of the human brain I’m sorry.

    • Photo: Jane Henry

      Jane Henry answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      Depends if you are talking about short or long-term memory. Most people have trouble remembering more than seven numbers in the short term, but with training people can get much much better. Some people teach themselves to remember hundreds of numbers by linking each number to a visual image. This helps as visual memory is better than verbal. We find it easier to remember things we repeat often, so we remember phone numbers we use a lot and not those we do not. Long-term memory is not as reliable as people think, experiments show that though people think they remember their childhood accurately, actually they remember it slightly differently in each decade as they get older. Memory is not a photographic record of events.

    • Photo: William Davies

      William Davies answered on 22 Jun 2010:

      Current estimates suggest that the brain can hold between 1 and 1000 terabytes (that is up to 1000 trillion bytes) of information – this estimate is based on numbers of neurons and on the capacity of each neuron. The processing power of the brain is better than that of most supercomputers. Our brains can probably hold much more memory than we realise – there are some people known as savants who can remember incredible amounts (such as whole telephone directories)

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