Our brains are able to forget in a way that robots can't
One of the things the human brain does well is forget things that are not important. Some sorts of forgetting - the way we subconsciously choose to keep and discard information - may be a functional advantage. And developers are realizing it's one of the hardest things about the human brain to recreate in artificial intelligence. It's not a bandwidth problem. Your brain could store memories from every moment in your life. Some people do - these individuals have a condition called "hyperthymesia" and can remember every detail from their lives. But, as Blake Richards and his colleague Paul Frankland argue in a paper published in the journal Neuron, ridding certain types of information from your brain is valuable for your functioning: Limiting the information we keep readily available means that the important stuff is more easily accessible. More here .