Quote:
Originally Posted by troutman
Is the human brain equipped to handle more than 100 years of memories and experiences?
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Actually that might be the biggest issue surrounding longer and longer life. I think if you are asking physically, the brain is equipped. If healthy it can always make new memories, and old ones are often forgot.
But the big thing is how we perceive time as we age. Ever notice how summers used to last forever when you were a kid? It took forever for your birthday to arrive. Waiting the last two weeks of Christmas was torture. Whereas as you get older, your birthday seems to show up just a month or two after it passed. You constantly wonder where the time went. Everything flies by faster and faster. There's more to it than changing priorities, or the excitement of childhood. It's because your brain is actually recording time differently.
The basic idea is simple. When you're five, waiting for your next birthday is waiting a full 20% of your life. When you're fifty, it's only 2%. It's not just a mathematical way of looking at it. Scientists are proving it actually makes a big difference in how your brain looks at, evaluates, even records things. Actually the way you 'experience' time.
So if we were to get into the really big numbers, 120, 150, even further, it would be really interesting to see how our brains, and as such, our values and even our personalities actually evolve. Considering we are healthy enough to be able to be aware of it of course. Life would seem like it's just flying by. It might be hard to attach importance to things anymore. Get excited about anything anymore. Even differentiate between more recent years with accuracy. Life might started to get really jumbled up, even with a healthy mind. (Actually, that does kinda fit into your question, but I'm kinda thinking of the more emotional problems with it). We may be kinda robotic just living from one day to the next because time has less and less meaning to us as we age making it hard to put the past in context and hard to plan for the future.
Course all this is assuming we would be healthy enough to be that introspective, which is probably impossible anyway. It's doubtful we'd just be able to add these years and still have a healthy body up to the 1-3 years before we die. As the ages gradually increase so would our relative health. So instead of infirmity being from 70-80, it would be from 86-100, or whatever the correct ratio would be. I'm assuming that even though the average age gets longer, the basic periods of life would remain around the same ratios. Especially if it is true that our brains experience time the way they suggest.
Sorry for the babble, had a hard time explaining that concept and then my ideas and feelings on it. Hope it made sense.