Is not a computer's capacity limited to the hard drive and are the contents of a book not limited by the number of pages? Much like a CD can only hold so much information, the limitless potential of the human brain applies only to the variety of information rather then the actual amount of it. The brain can absorb and explain the most complex systems imaginable, but the brain is in itself a system. It is born, it grows, and it stabilizes in relation to the environment, and eventually grows cold. While the cells of the brain, thehardware of the mind, are growing the knowledge simply cannot fill it fast enough. Until it outgrows its "immediate environment" and the size of the skull, being forced to forever afterrecycle the same cellsin the changing neural connections that give the impression of growth. Mental growth. Which ceases to occur once the brain reaches its target size, from that point on mental growth gives way tomental recycling.

You can learn new things, but in order to do so these things have to hold an ever increasing relevance for you. Some minds hold useless knowledge while others hold only the most pertinent knowledge, yet in either case the "MOST" use-less knowledge in your mind may give way to allow a new idea of an essential value to take root. The most frightening aspect of "Mental Recyclery" is that once your brain reaches it's peak you have to forget in order to learn, never quite becoming fully aware of just what you have given up. You cannot know what you have forgotten, be it your childhood memories or the last present you received from an uncle before his death, because it is nearly impossible to try to remember something you have forgotten knowing in the first place.

As the number of brain cells stays constant, even decaying over time, the only change that occurs is just in what ways they are connected. Our brains can hold sensory data, maintaining a bank of interconnected sounds, images, and sensations, that leave impressions upon us over the course of our lives. This long term memory, this configuration of our brains is locked in for the most part. For if you were to recycle memories day after day, constantly replacing those least used with that important experience of the day,in time your brain would have recycled all of it's "non-essential" memory several times over. This would eventually lead to the point where we are literally locked into our current mindsets, too burdened to take on any new experiences, relying on a camera to remember our lives for us while the photo album gathers its yearly dust, until our only memories are of us telling others about the photos.

That is why it is always important to practice your basic math.