'Our brains aren't designed to store an infinite amount of information,' says Joe Tsien, a neurologist who runs the Brain Decoding Project at Georgia Regents University.Д«ehavioral studies have shown that learning something new can promote forgetting. Theoretically, your storage capacity for long-term memories is endless.ДЇorgetting is, counterintuitively, an important part of that learning process. It's not that you're out of hard drive space you're just learning to sort and group the information you've newly acquired. 'Your brain has to settle into the right pattern, and if you are confused, your memory can fail when you settle on the wrong pattern.' If you're learning two related languages at the same time, say Portuguese and Spanish, you may find words from one invading the sovereign territory of the other. 'I assume it happens because two different ideas that are similar have similarities in the patterns of brain activity,' he says.

Though memory interference is well documented, researchers like Cowan are still guessing at the phenomenon's neural mechanics. If you can't remember it, a memory is pretty much worthless-and similar memories can interfere with each other, getting in the way of surfacing the right one. They can crossbreed, like similar but distinct species, creating the recollection equivalent of a mule. Memories don't always keep to themselves, though. And your brain's ability to knit together new patterns is limitless, so theoretically the number of memories stored in those patterns is limitless as well. Over the long term, memories are encoded in neural patterns-circuits of connected neurons. 'It's not like each memory takes a cell and then that cell is used up,' says Nelson Cowan, cognitive psychologist at the University of Missouri. But, wait-is that how it works? Can your brain run out of space, like a hard drive? It depends on what kind of memory you're talking about. With all those new adventures stacking up, you might start worrying that your brain is growing full. You probably remember the digits of pi, or at least the first three of them (slacker).Д®ach day you accumulate fresh memories-kissing new people, acquiring different phone numbers and (possibly) competing in pi-memorizing championships (we would root for you). You remember your childhood phone number, where you parked your car, and the last time you got really drunk.

What happens when you run out of ram