X-Message-Number: 21140 Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 07:03:37 -0500 From: Thomas Donaldson <> Subject: addition to previous 10 Feb message Hi everyone! In my message for 10 February I criticised both Drexler and Kurzweil (or at least what they are reported to have said) on the amount of memory our brains can store, saying basically that until we knew how our brains stored memories such figures were speculation only. I should have added a bit, to make my doubts a bit more clear: the problem is very simple. We do NOT know whether or not our brains compress memories also. I'm not claiming that they'd use the same compression algorithm, but nothing keeps them from having their own. This would increase the storage amount by an unknown factor. As a simple matter of fact, it's known that different aspects of the memory of a scene or event are stored in different brain areas: color here, geometry elsewhere, and so on. That doesn't PROVE that our brains use compression, but it does make it look more likely. Best wishes and long long life for all, Thomas Donaldson Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=21140