I just learned the other day that our brain constantly (?) prunes connections as we grow older. As a child, we have several orders of magnitude more synaptic connections than as an adult. I guess we could consider this as the brain optimizing. On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1@pipeline.com> wrote:
As we get older, we may lose some of the connections in our corpus collosum:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Split-brain
At 08:36 PM 4/29/2011, Stephen B. Gray wrote:
On 4/29/2011 6:10 PM, Fred lunnon wrote:
Where is everybody?
Don't tell me they've all been watching Kate& Wills ...
WFL
I have 0 interest in Kate & Willie.
Here is a speculation on something nonmathematical. It often happens that we can't recall a word or someone's name but "know that we know" it. Consider the memory space taken up in two cases: 1. We recall the name with no problem. 2. We can't recall it, but it still takes up the same amount of memory, plus the space needed to realize we can't recall it.
Brain economy would, I think, prefer the easier situation. So why does it ever happen that we know that we know it but can't recall it?
Admittedly a very naive view, but this and other evidence convinces me that storing and retrieving are very different operations.
Steve Gray
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