Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Processing in the Human Mind

Humans load thoughts into their thinking part of their brain when they want to use them. When they are not in use, they get stored to the storage part of the brain. It would be impossible to think about everything that one knows at the same time. The memory part of the brain is not as large as the storage part of the brain. While thinking new thoughts, the brain processes these thoughts and stores an abstraction of what is being thought of. The processing part of the brain reduces all of the new thoughts and stores the essential pieces of it to the storage part of the brain for later use. Over time, the processing part of the brain removes or further abstracts unused thoughts that are stored. Over time, a thought is more and more abstract. A thought from yesterday where every piece of the thought is stored in memory decays over time. A thought from a year ago, has far less pieces stored.

When storing vision, every image that is ever seen could not possibly be stored. It is just far too much information to store. Images that are deemed important are stored in the storage part of the brain. An image that is seen very frequently is going to be deemed more important. If closing ones eyes and thinking of an image that was seen in the past, the image will be loaded into memory. It will be much more abstract than actually looking at the image because of size constraints.

Thoughts that are not currently being used are sometimes brought into memory. This bogs down the processing part of the brain because the brain can only process a limited amount of information at one time. To concentrate, the brain must not load any unused thoughts out of the storage part of the brain and into the memory part of the brain. Storage is, of course, referred to as long-term memory. Memory is referred to as short-term memory.

The brain is very similar to how a computer functions. And, a computer is very similar to how a brain functions. Computers were designed based on the constructs of the brain.

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