The next time you're told some important information, you might
want to write it down. Or at least, that's what German
scientists would advise. Researchers from University of
Göttingen and the Bernstein Center for Computational
Neuroscience have found that human brains actually forget
information at a "surprisingly high" rate. How high? Try one-
bit-per-active-neuron-per-second high. Looking at the processes
of neurons in the brain, the scientists discovered that
processes in the cerebral cortex are extremely chaotic,
particularly when information enters the brain (known as a
spike). Scientists originally believed that these spikes cause
the electrically charged neurons to become active. Neurons all
work together to get the information from one neuron to another.
Now, researchers have reason to believe an additional electric
force acts on the cell membrane to make the neuron active.
Thanks to this discovery, scientists could then answer the
question of how long it takes for a human brain to forget
things. More