Gary’s Q&A

Listener question & Gary’s response · Transcript passage

Jesus Chan asks, Hello again from Laredo, Texas Gary and you’ll be glad to know that this question does not involve aliens. Do thoughts, ideas, dreams, and memories have physical weight or mass? If not, then how are they, like memories able to persist or exist for an entire lifetime?

That is a fair question, Jesus. Information doesn’t require mass. It requires energy.

When you put data on a hard drive, the hard drive doesn’t get heavier. You are using energy to organize the magnetic bits on the drive, assuming its a magnetic drive, in such a way that the information can be read.

If you write something down on paper with a pen, the total mass of the pen/paper system is the same. What you are doing is providing energy to provide order to the ink to store information.

Think about it if you have a collection of letters for a letter board. What is required to turn those letters from a random collection into something legible is the energy to put the letters into some sort of order. No mass has to be added to the letters.

The same process goes on in your brain. Your brain uses a tremendous amount of energy. Your brain uses energy to build new circuits and connections between neurons, which is how memories are stored.

So, memories do not have mass any more than the data on a hard drive has mass. It uses energy to provide order to previously existing bits of matter.