What are the Final Limits of Human Potential?

Unlock the Secrets of the Human Body! Discover mind-boggling facts about memory, temperature resilience, sexual endurance, pregnancy milestones, and astonishing feats of endurance like going without sleep for 11 days! You won't believe it!

[jacara]

Fun fact, if you were immortal, because of the physical limit of storage, after the first 5k years or so you would no longer remember who you were when young or anyone including your family and friends that died. The upper limit is thought to be at most 10k years. After that you just know the last 10k years.

[jtjames]

Always found it funny all the people that think but human mind as an endless hard drive.

Remind me about a story about a professor, who knew the name of every fish, but didn't know the name of a single student.

When a student ask why this was the case, the professor said every time he remembers the name of a student, he forgets the name of a fish.

[jetBlue_]

"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the
blessed machine." 😅

[stevestewart]

My record for consecutive sleepless days is around 80hrs due to chronic insomnia. It attacks in waves. Around 16hrs you start losing the ability to focus. This disappears if you can push through 30hrs, but at this stage visual and auditory hallucinations start to become active. After 40hrs things get really weird. Spatial awareness becomes almost non-existent, words become a chore and fine motor skills are gone.
During one particularly savage bout of my insomnia I ended up in hospital. The CT and MRI they gave me that time was insane when the results were read. The specialist said my brain looked like it was on DMT.
Sleeplessness is horrible and I'd not wish ongoing insomnia on my worst enemy.

[xessenceofinsanityx]

Sleeplessness is weird. I once went 60 hours on zero sleep absolutely fine, until I fell asleep sitting upright and didn't even notice.
Another time, I starting hallucinating after only 27 hours

[ridgecrestwack]

As am ex meth addict I can promise you it is very possible to stay up longer then 72 hours straight. I've gone about 7 days straight without any sleep and I'm still alive. Half retarded, but alive.

[chress]

The number of times that I gasped in surprise, shock, and/or awe speaks for the quality of this video

[ignitionfrn]

0:55 - Chapter 1 - The limit of knowledge
4:50 - Chapter 2 - The timeless body
8:05 - Chapter 3 - The unbreakable body

[shellshell]

I went 7 weeks without food because of pancreatitis...left hospital weighing 32kg. I was so excited when I was allowed to eat but it took about a year before I could eat properly again. First thing I had was chocolate 😁

[ariste]

Lol as a raging insomniac those sleep stats are kinda scary for me. I think the longest I've gone on absolutely no sleep is about a week. It gets hard to keep track. I used to go 4+ days about once a month. What I think doesn't get talked about is its not just being up days in end. I'm not up for 4+ days and sleeping normal the rest of the time. I might sleep an hour, be up 2 days, then get 45 min of sleep. I used to go 2 weeks on like 10hrs total sometimes, but people focus more on how long you've been up rather than the overall sleep debt accumulated. Anyways thank goodness my state allows medical marijuana. I still only average maybe 4-5hrs sleep per night but that's a huge improvement.

[jaredrobinson]

energy cannot be created or destroyed. The energy is what DRIVES conciousness.

[ares_bluesteel]

The lower life expectancy back then was due to childhood and infant deaths from poor to nonexistent healthcare and medicine. People routinely lived into their 60s and 70s or more if they made it to adulthood. People do live longer more often thanks to modern medicine, but it’s not a 30 year improvement like that misleading average life expectancy number suggests.

[Bluelagoonstudios]

I think memory is very advanced from a human, because besides math and understanding schemes and patterns, there are a thousand of other information going on. Like past events, problems, stress, emotions and more on top of these amazing achievements. But humans are learning for decades how and what and can be receptacle for new opportunity's and knowledge. Let's say I'm an introvert person, but I see more things than other people do see things. Like entering a room and noticing small things that others skip, that can be from a chair to a crack in a wall or ceiling or a small statue. This also gives me sometimes a gut feeling in my stomach and is rarely wrong. Especially about people. Also, memory is always on from a human, even when we sleep, and that is even more advanced than any computer till this day. That's why I look differently to AI, but always with a critical state of mind. I learned this over the years, thinking critically about things and take your time with these new technologies. When I was in my twenty's I had a moment working 3 jobs per day, doing my official job, placing car stereo and alarms and late in the evening repairing electronic devices, so there were days from 96 hours. Which was 'normal' for me at that time. Without losing scope and coffee was my best friend in those days. Now I'm 56 and that hour's regime isn't possible anymore. But my memory is still fresh and helping me on a daily basis.

[ItsLunaRegina]

Thank you for not putting a sponsor in this one, Simon. Love you.

[alexanderwu]

Angus Barbieri took vitamins and yeast and also sometimes milk and sugar, so that doesn't really count as not eating

[jamesleatherwood]

On that data limit for the brain thing. That limit can only be close to accurate if the assumption is that each individual neuron is equivalent to a byte (smallest useful piece of data) But we know that the same inputs can often result in a myriad of possible outputs, and also that different inputs may produce the same output. This means that each neuron more likely represent multiple different posiible bytes depending whatever it is that it depends on. (c'mon the lack of knowledge about the brain was disclaimed at the beginning of the video) It is also highly likely that the web of pathways the neurons form is highly complex. This means there could very well be nodes where for example, fire truck, barn, stop sign, and the traffic light for stop are all red. Its highly unlikey that your brain stores a separate neuronal pattern for red associated with each of those item, but far more likely that the pathways make a connection between a single instance of red (which itself incorporates all the different shades and tones, etc) and the other items, which in turn are connected to other nodes such as 'emergency light' for the fire truck and 'octagon' for the stop sign. That way, when you see fire truck and the node for fire truck lights up, it also lights up the areas for 'red' and ' emergency lights (which might remind you of a police car because police car is also connected to 'emergency lights' etc) Then your brain can back process the unecessary info out of whatever its delivering to your consciousness. (similzr to how your eyes are actually sensitive enough to see the flickering of a lightbulb as the AC current turns on and back off ever so many times a scond, but your brain straight just present you with the final conscious experience of not seeing the flicker. even though you brain has to do this AFTER you eyes have picked up the sensory info, but BEFORE you conscious experience of the world is processed.) With this kind of node interconnection, combined with the back processing of incoming sensory data, The entire way of storing, retrieving and processing data is fundamentally, at base level, on the foudation of concept, different from, and also more capable than a standard computer. So unless we can figure out HOW the brain process information, which will lead us to how it stores information, there can be no way of knowing what exactly the limit is. Just my not-a-scientist, unprofessional, i-think-its-logical-though opinion on the matter....allegedly! :P

[karamedley]

I have always been on the fence about being immortal or not. I'd hate to see the world change so much, losing loved ones, but I also want to see where us humans end up and what all we accomplish.

[danielthompson]

A few days before my daughter was born, her doctor delivered a 15lb baby. My baby was about 7 and a half pounds. I'm still dumbfounded to this day.

[WelcomeToDERPLAND]

The limit is probably when we can perfectly integrate our brains into computers and basically utilize our brains as effectively as we can command a computer to do things, or integrate our brains & consciousness into a mechanical body that will live forever & has strength far exceeding anything a human could do- but at that point are we even human anymore?

If possible, complete digitization and turning our consciousness into data to the point of basically being an AI ourselves would probably the be the absolute final limit on human 'potential' where we could live as a ghost infinitely and forever inside a planet, solar system or even galaxy wide super computer/internet.

But that still just makes the question "at what point do we stop being human?" even more prevalent, the same could be said for once we start to genetically modify babies and people, or enhance our bodies with cybernetics, at what point does one stop being human?

Is it when the body is more metal and synthetic than biological? Is it when all the biological material is replaced? Is it when we finally lose our humanity, morals and critical thinking-oh wait that's something people already do so I guess it cant be that one.

[anonymousrex]

The number of people in the comments that are lying about things they did is definitely going to be a fun read on this one.