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It’s as if my knowledge is extensible. Before the internet, my head contained most of what I knew. The rest was stored in my bookshelves, photo albums, video tapes, and filing cabinets, but if I learned something in the traditional sense - a foreign language for example -the majority of the words were stored in my brain whilst I kept the rest in reserve in a dictionary. In day to day terms, I made an effort to remember peoples’ phone numbers. I knew the recipe for goulash. I had various travel routes memorised and stored away for easy access. And if some new piece of information came along, I just filed it away for future use and retrieved it when I needed it. Occasionally data would drop out of my head, never to be retained, and sometimes I remembered things I would really rather have forgotten, but the total amount of knowledge I could hold was limited by the storage capacity of my skull. What does that add up to? A couple of litres or so. OK, I had a couple of litres of data.
It seems it's even less than a litre. According to The Guardian:
"The number of things you can hold in your mind at once has been traced to one penny-sized part of the brain."
See Memory bottleneck limits intelligence Thursday April 22, 2004, The Guardian
