When we are learning things, we use our five senses sight, smell, taste, touch, and hearing. However, even after understanding things with these five senses, one cannot guarantee that they will retain all the information they learn from these senses. Is there a way we can increase our capability of learning? Researchers have found out that if we had 7 senses, they could’ve aided us in better learning. Researchers at Skoltech created a math formula, a mathematical model, to figure out how our memory works. The results they got are really interesting and could help make robots and artificial intelligence (AI) smarter and also teach us more about the human brain. The study's main idea, published in Scientific Reports, is that there might be a perfect number of senses for storing information, and that our current five senses might not be enough. How Can We Measure Memories? To build their model, the team focused on tiny, basic parts of memory called engrams. Think of engrams as the building blocks of memory. An engram is essentially a small, spread-out group of brain cells (neurons) that flash or "fire" together when you think of something. Each engram represents a single concept or idea, like your memory of a banana. How do we know what a banana is? We use our senses! Its yellow appearance, its sweet smell, its unique taste. The model treats these sensory details as features or dimensions. Since humans have five main senses: sight, smell, taste, touch, hearing, a banana, in your mind's memory space, it is a five-dimensional object. These memory blocks, the engrams, don't stay the same. They change over time, becoming clearer or fuzzier depending on how often you interact with the real-world object. This process of changing engrams is how we learn and forget. How Many Senses Do We Need For Memory? First, they showed that memories tend to settle down into a stable, lasting pattern over time. They called this a "steady state." This means that after a learning period, a fixed, or "mature," way of organizing memories is set up. Next, the team tried to figure out the maximum number of distinct ideas or concepts (the memory capacity) that could be held in this stable system. They discovered that memory is at its absolute best (it stores the most distinct concepts) when each idea is described by seven features or dimensions. The experts working on the research explained that they found out that when we understand the concept with all seven senses, there is a bigger probability of retaining things. This means that if our brains had seven senses instead of five, we might be able to process and remember a much larger number of distinct concepts, leading to the "seven senses claim." Can We Train AI To Have 7 Senses? This number, seven, suggests that if you want a system to have the deepest understanding of the world, having seven inputs is the way to go. Researchers found that the number seven showed up consistently as the best number, no matter how they slightly changed the other parts of their memory model. It seems to be a solid rule for how memory blocks (engrams) work. While the idea of evolving new human senses is just a fun thought, the seven-sense finding is very practical for technology. If you design an AI or robot to have seven different ways of "sensing" the world, its memory and ability to understand new concepts might be greatly improved. One small detail is that the model considers memories that are very similar, even if they have slightly different sizes to represent just one concept when counting the total capacity.
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