Making sense of the finite infinity within our skulls

The great paradox of human cognition

Much like a society, our bodies run on an economy. Though we often hate to admit it, our biological resources are limited. We can sustain our attention for only so long. We can stay awake for only so long. We can go only so long without nutrients. We can live for only so long.

From this vantage point, the human mind — in all its organic glory — is a very finite, uninspiring thing. Like everything else, it’s born, eats through resources, and then gets extinguished — all according to an unforgiving clock. Feels a bit tragic.

And yet, this biological reality is paired with the inalienable sense that there’s something quite infinite about us. That the human mind (unlike the human brain) has the unprecedented capacity to stretch in all directions, to store enormous amounts of information, to outlive the fragile shell that hauls it around.

Fortunately, much of that intuition is true. As far as we know, our long-term memory is, in fact, unlimited (as in we never end up tapping all of it during our lifetime). For as long as we’re alive and lucid, we can continue cramming in memories and pulling them back up to the surface when they’re needed. The integrity and reliability of those memories might be another story — but your brain will find a way to make room for them, nonetheless.

And while those memories won’t outlive you once your time on earth is done, there is a characteristic you that does certainly live on in others’ minds, through your creative work, etc. There’s enough of a colloquial you that we could conceive of a future where uploading your unique conscious self to an advanced digital platform is possible. There’s undoubtedly the sense that that very finite construction in your skull could conceivably go on and on, across a number of dimensions.

In this way, the human mind is a paradox of infinity within the finite. So much room for memory, experience, growth — and yet dependent on quite limited resources to make it all happen.

While our memory might stretch endlessly, our attention surely does not. Attention is, by definition, a precious and limited resource. It’s something that must be “paid” because, like any currency, there is a trade associated with it — an opportunity cost. Attention paid to one thing means everything else is largely ignored.

Our relatively modern notions of task-switching and decision fatigue emerge from the realization that your brain (like your wallet) cannot pay everyone for everything all the time. The attention lost to pesky decisions or the constant switching between your email and a key project add up over the course of a day and deplete your available stock of daily attention reserves until you’re left feeling disoriented and woolly-brained.

That feeling of mental infinity is sharply and unequivocally cut off by real-world, brain-based limitations.

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That’s all the time we have, folks

Our attention and day-to-day cognitive resources always seem to be in short supply — and perhaps are ever-dwindling. But even more urgently, our entire conscious experience is bookended by an inevitable expiration date, which imbues our time on earth with a subtle and unwelcome sense of finitude.

In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman makes the case that because we’re destined to live about a mere four thousand weeks, it’s our duty to live them earnestly. When we truly confront our mortality, we’re met with the realization that time is, quite literally, the most precious of human resources — and that we simply don’t have time to waste on trivial distractions.

Unfortunately, the mind is quite skilled at being distracted by distractions and wants very much for you to lose time paying attention to them all. Ah, attention again — inextricably bound to time and just as finite.

The mind struggles to stick to a single course, preferring stimulation and distraction to the cognitively expensive task of staying on target. This goes for an hour-long task — and for the course of our life. It’s impossible to avoid thinking of the future, imagining different lives for ourselves, watching them all play out before us in our mind’s eye, like Sylvia Plath’s famous fig leaves in The Bell Jar:

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked ... I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.

The mind’s infinitely imaginative power to dream up alternate worlds becomes, in this way, a liability, rather than an asset. With our persistent feeling of an eternal present moment, the future always feels long and distant and inscrutable. We fail to ground ourselves in the one life we do, in fact, lead at this moment.

In the time-limited world we all share, we tragically don’t have an infinite capacity to experiment and test out each of the lives that our discontented minds relentlessly conjure. We must go through the gradual winnowing process of adulthood, carefully selecting the things that merit our non-renewable supplies of time and attention.

But, with such unmovable limitations comes, again paradoxically, a sort of liberation. The absurdity of your existence entitles you to live it in a meaningful way. You may not have unlimited paths, but there is still plenty of room for you to feel the unlimited joy that comes with our naturally limitless minds.

I recently came across Substack writer

Heather Havrilesky

’s radiant response to the question “Why did no one tell me that life is so limited?” To me, her answer is an ode to the mental infinity we all share:

In order to cultivate an unlimited mindset, you don’t just accept limits, you embrace them. You say to yourself, “I can flourish in this difficult place. I can tolerate these absurd humans. Because inside me, there is a vast, wide sea that swirls and shifts, sparkling gray and blue like this vast, wide sky above me.”

Unfortunately, I find that much of our consternation, as an individual and as a species, lies in this incongruence between our feeling of being a universe within a universe and the depressingly limited biological blob to which that feeling is confined. Put simply, we feel infinite but are trapped by the finite.

Fellow Substack writer

Tommy Blanchard

puts it so crisply in his article about existing as a conscious being with our deeply familiar first-person subjectivity:

Instead of a head, when I look at my body, I find shoulders terminating upwards into a void. That void where my head should be is simultaneously the entire world. I too speak when others speak to me, navigate the world, eat food, and socialize with others. But there is a fundamental difference. When I engage in these acts, there is something it is like to engage in them. That void that is the universe fills with sights, sounds, feelings.

What would we do for more time, energy, mental scratchpads to take all the infinite memory and imagination that churns within us and bring it forth into the world? Is this how technology saves us? Is this how technology has always saved us? By giving us the keys to take what once could only exist in our scattered and fragile brains and make it last somewhere outside of us?

Before writing and books, we relied on the vast and beautiful terrain of memory to carry thought from one individual to another. Eventually, one could write down their thoughts to let them live on outside their single, vulnerable brain. Now, through the uncanny power of the internet, those thoughts can be sent to anyone with the broadband connection and the interest to read them. Digital tools are casually referred to as a second brain.

Technology, in all its dueling wonder and horror, appears to gradually grant us the infinity we’ve long sought after. When viewed like this, we see that, rather than replace us or render us mindless drones, human technologies are merely extensions of us, rooted uncompromisingly in our needs, wants, desires. The infinite sense of time and future and memory and ease that they provide is a product of our longings and resentment of limitations. Not something evil and conniving that threatens us from the outside.

We are the finitely infinite ones. We are the ones with the power to stretch in all directions — alongside a healthy relationship with our technologies. The drama begins when we forget that we are the origin — the masterminds who have worked out ways to save time, preserve memories, transcend geographical barriers, communicate instantly — and instead let the technologies get the better of us. As Substack writer

Freya India

said in her most recent post:

Resist platforms that feed you infinite information on a screen, replacing finite moments with the people right in front of you.

Technologies are just tools to inch us a little closer to fulfilling our deep-rooted desire to be infinite — we mustn’t let them become anything more than that in this ruthlessly finite world. We, as living, breathing humans, have the single most complex thing in the known universe right here in our skulls. And there’s something limitlessly liberating about that.

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