How much information can the human brain and memory store or hold? Capacity of Human Memory?
Is it true that you have to forget something to remember new information? Most certainly not. This is a famous quote by Homer Simpson but consider the source. :) The capacity of the human memory is much larger than this.
So what is the capacity of human memory? If you are to put it into terms of digital storage it would be about 2.5 million petabytes. There are challenges with this measurement because first of all how do you measure capacity of human memory or even human memory? It’s really impossible with what we know right now.
The capacity of human memory is a guess at about 2.5 million petabytes. To put that in perspective if your brain worked like a DVR then you would have to leave the television running for over 300 years continuously to fill up 2.5 million petabytes. So that gives you an idea of the massive amount of storage in the capacity of human memory.
I personally have memorized 7,000 words in sequence for a project. This did not even come close to pushing the limits of human memory or the capacity of human memory.
Is the capacity of human memory a limited amount or can you increase the storage capacity? That is a mystery.
What is not a mystery, however, is that you can increase the amount of information that you can remember by using memory systems such as the Mind Palace
But the next time you hear someone saying that they have to forget information to remember new information this is not true. There is no way they are consciously making room for new material by arranging other data in their memory.
