Stone-Age Brains
Capacity limits are a critical feature of a system designed to generate predictions about the future.
From Adaptive Education: Learning and Remembering with a Stone-Age Brain.
Given the enormous capacity of long-term memory—we can remember thousands of images presented for a few seconds each (see Brady et al., 2008)—why constrain our short-term system in such a significant way? The answer lies partly in a critical adaptive problem that our working memory system needs to solve—predicting future perceptions and actions accurately. As Trapp et al. (2021) explain, to avoid exponential explosion of possible outcomes, it is essential to constrain the number of active environmental representations in mind. Form follows function in this case—capacity limits are a critical feature of a system designed to generate predictions about the future, not simply to maintain information in the present.
