Soft Drive Almost Full: Are We Filling Our Minds With Garbage?
The brain is a miraculous sponge that remembers more than we may imagine. Computers use hard drives and SSD’s to store terabytes worth of data which can be thrown in the trash that is then emptied and permanently deleted to free up space. However, the biological Soft Drives that are our brains have no such convenient storage management. We can’t drag useless information into a little trash can icon at the corner of our minds and free up space.
No one is quite sure of everything we remember but if you try a little exercise and attempt to recall some recent things you saw online or in an app you use regularly I’m sure you’ll be impressed how much you can vaguely recall if not quite clearly. That’s because while you were endlessly doom scrolling Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and the rest, your brain’s Record Button was pressed (as it always is except when blackout drunk or super high) and was causing all you were seeing and hearing to be encoded into a finite set of molecules in your brain. Are you sure you want to be doing that to your poor little 3 lb. brain?
Even if one can’t recall certain things in one’s life clearly or at all, it is believed that under hypnosis one can retrieve even more hidden memories which means those too were recorded such as what one was wearing and what one ate on a particular day. They also say that traumatic or exhilarating memories are imprinted more deeply in the mind and thus easier to remember and harder to forget. I think most of us find this to be true. We can probably safely conclude that storage and retrieval are two different systems and we generally store more than we can readily retrieve. Those distant, hidden memories may in fact be informing decisions we make through our subconscious minds but we have much more to learn on that neuroscience topic.
The brain’s storage capacity is estimated to be approximately 2.5 Petabytes (2.5 million gigabytes or 2,500 terabytes) which is a good sized storage device for sure. But considering that it records video and audio during each waking hour as well as associated metadata and all manner of knowledge and skills too we might want to be careful how casually we treat its still quite finite capacity. It even records our dreams which some can recall better than others. Modern life is highly stimulative and filled with endless images and sounds and words to record—much more so than in past times.
Millions of years of evolution changed our chimp-like smaller brains into the wonders that they are today but since our last upgrade to homo sapiens approximately 200,000 years ago not much has changed in our brains. For over 99% of those years we lived in a much less stimulating environment and our lives were much simpler and we had far less to record. Or did we? Maybe it’s the exact same amount as ever but it’s sort of like recording a video with fewer things in frame but still each frame is recorded as normal and takes up the same space regardless. It’s doubtful that we record the inside of our eyelids when our eyes are shut so there is very likely there is all sorts of stuff we don’t record to memory. It would be interesting to do a PET scan on humans at different phases of evolution and try to figure out the difference in brain storage and usage. Unfortunately, we only have us to test and we are currently running an experiment on ourselves.
This topic occurred to me as I am a bit of a phone addict as are many of us. As I was scrolling my Instagram feed looking at some interesting and some not so interesting things I got an odd feeling that led me to realize I was probably abusing my Soft Drive which led me to think we all are! I’m sure everyone has experienced some form of this, sometimes called overstimulation. What if it’s also over-memorization?
Memory is a function we all take for granted but we may or may not have a lot of control over what is memorized in our lives and we may be more affected by it than we know. It might not be a coincidence that anxiety, depression and insomnia are at an all-time high in modern society and it is often blamed on the stresses of the world such as politics, environmental degradation and the rat race in general. Those most certainly contribute to our unease but we may be adding to this by filling our minds with endless streams of disconnected posts, images, videos, songs and more. Much of this is straight up garbage and perhaps permanent litter in our minds with no delete function.
I’m not sure the repercussions but at the very least we have fewer “peaceful” moments to remember to give us solace and calm. I suspect it may be much worse than that and is actually limiting our potential for enjoyment of a full life. So much has changed in the last three decades that this experiment is quite early on and we’re not positive how our digitally bombarded minds will be in old age. Something to ponder.
The takeaway from this reading is for you to try and be mindful of what you are storing both in quantity and quality so as to find a happy medium between calm and utter insanity. Seek ways to de-stimulate and let your poor homo sapiens brain get a respite and have some nice calm waters to recall too. Don’t assume infinite capacity to store nor to manage and use the information encoded into the molecules of your neurons. Don’t assume because you are young its OK to fill every nook and cranny of your brain with endless feeds because you may just need that space for something better later. I’ve never heard of someone literally coming up against a wall of no more memory space but if any generation is pushing this limit, we are. My brilliant 94 year old English professor mother is definitely struggling to find words as easily as she once did and recalling certain things. This is a normal part of aging but we have yet to see what happens when Millennials and the Digital Natives age. I hope for them to have lots of good memories and skills and useful knowledge and to have forgotten or avoided enough garbage to leave room for the good stuff. We shall see.
Respect your memory.
