The human brain contains 100 billion neurons, and each neuron is in contact with a thousand others, more or less. If we think of each connection as being "on" or "off" (a crude simplification), then we can say that the human brain stores roughly 5,000 gigabytes of information (the equivalent of 5,000 billion keyboard characters). I'm not sure I did the calculation right, but that's more than enough capacity to store every poem you ever learned plus Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.
Still, memories slip away. And, when the power goes off, it is lost forever. Which is why we resort to diaries, scrapbooks, photo albums, souvenir collections. More publicly, we have memoirs, autobiographies, homepages, blogs. The internet has become willy-nilly the collective memory of our species. How vunerable are our wikiselves to evaporation? I have piles and piles of floppy disks around the house that will never be read again. There was one more thing my wife said last evening that I wanted to add. Now let's see, what was it? It's just on the tip of my tongue...”
by Chet Raymo
Is it lost forever? Memories? I doubt it so :) - SR
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