Knowledge Panic

Do you ever panic at the thought you will never catch up with all there is to know? I regularly do.
Today I face my fears, the engineer way: assessing, deconstructing and putting a number on them.
That number is 0.0002%, or one part in 450.000.

How much accessible information can be retained by my brain?

Let’s dissect:

• how much — I want to be quantitative, not just descriptive. I will take the estimated available knowledge of today as a reference.
• accessible — this means I can readily retrieve from my memory in a usable fashion
• information — this is the most critical definition. Strictly speaking, information is also the way each leaf of the tree in front of me waves in the wind, of the awareness of what I ate last month.
  What I want to assess in this context are however facts and sustainable interpretations (I prefer to call the latter “models”).
• brain — you know, that part I protect with a skull. Not my smart phone, not my PC, not my bookshelves, not my hand-written notes. The part I identify myself with, at least as long as “I” still includes my mortal shape.

I could add “in the long-term” to the question, but that would make things even more miserable, so I do myself a favour and will skip on that.