Short term memory is just as much a physical event in the brain as a memory of your hometown. We have our 86 billion neurons give or take, and there's only so much space. Maybe the finiteness of the human brain helps to explain why we have such bad memories. And I don't know if I don't really think it's due to capacity limitation. It's more because people have the wrong idea of memory. Remembering something is much more of a reconstructive event. You've shown your life, it really happened. Turn out to be often dramatically false.
In his expansive new book, "Psych: The Story of the Human Mind," Paul Bloom, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, lays out, in his words, "basically everything I know about the mind." And when he says everything, he means it. Where does consciousness come from? Does IQ matter? What makes us happy? Was Sigmund Freud a madman? The answers to these questions (and more) are all in Paul's book — and in this episode.
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