My parents always used to joke about this: “Couldn’t I have done something better with that neuron?”
Kid me interpreted this to mean that memory was finite and that, once allocated, was not reusable. It seems incredibly silly in retrospect, but I starred making a conscious effort not to remember things I didn’t need to, so as to “conserve space” so to speak. I still occasionally have to stop myself from doing that.
All it got me was a complete lack of practice at remembering things. I still have exactly this problem – I’ll occasionally remember perfectly something I saw over a decade ago, but forget where I left my phone, without exaggeration, three seconds after I set it down.
There you go, OP – empirical evidence that that’s not why. It’s not that our brains get full, we’re just eternally cursed to be like this
My parents always used to joke about this: “Couldn’t I have done something better with that neuron?”
Kid me interpreted this to mean that memory was finite and that, once allocated, was not reusable. It seems incredibly silly in retrospect, but I starred making a conscious effort not to remember things I didn’t need to, so as to “conserve space” so to speak. I still occasionally have to stop myself from doing that.
All it got me was a complete lack of practice at remembering things. I still have exactly this problem – I’ll occasionally remember perfectly something I saw over a decade ago, but forget where I left my phone, without exaggeration, three seconds after I set it down.
There you go, OP – empirical evidence that that’s not why. It’s not that our brains get full, we’re just eternally cursed to be like this