Imagine that you knew how much memory you had left in your brain. Maybe there’s a progress bar in the corner of your eye. Or maybe you can visualize the percentage at will.

In any case, anytime you experience something new, you use up a little more memory and sense that. After a difficult class or a long movie, you might find that you are running low on storage. If you run out—you can’t memorize anything new.

Such memory awareness might seem like a useful ability, until you realize the caveat: You can’t simply erase memory and free up space. The only way to get more space is to wait. Gradually, if you don’t create more memories, and especially after sleep, old memories fade and leave some room for new ones. But you have no control over that process. That’s how human memory works.

Imagine how paranoid you would get! Open a social media app, and see it pour gigabytes of useless soup into your memory capacity. Turn on the TV, and watch your brain rapidly fill up with jingles from commercials. I bet that simply having that reminder of limited memory capacity would make you obsessive about controlling what enters your brain.

But hold on, you might say, we may not be aware of how much storage we have left, but we don’t run out of memory in the same way a computer does when you are trying to copy a big file.

As a matter of fact, we do. We just don’t feel it.

We memorize things by making adjustments to the wiring diagram of the brain. Neurons........

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