Chickens with red ear lobes lay brown eggs. Chickens with white ear lobes lay white ones.

To which I reply: chickens have ears?

Yes, and rotten eggs float, but fresh ones sink.

These are the things one learns at 4 a.m. when even the Slap Chop guy is yawning on TV and your spouse, who might have previously complained that you never talk anymore, declines to wake up and engage in conversation. So, unable to sleep, you pick up a book and read about eggs.

Fascinating subject, eggs, though there is this little nagging voice asking if this is really the arcane stuff with which you should clutter your brain.

That is, many people (OK, I) have long suspected that the human head can only hold so much knowledge. For everything you remember, there is something you forget. As a piece of information goes in one ear, a tidbit gets forced out the other.

History is full of examples. Einstein discovered relativity, but was notorious for losing umbrellas.

Stephen Harper got a majority, suddenly drew a blank on parliamentary democracy. Bill Clinton met Monica Lewinsky, instantly forgot he was married.

Not everyone has the same storage space. Some of us have the memory retention of a Commodore 64, while others possess a cranial capacity equal to Japan's K computer, which can make 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second. You can find these latter types at the University of Victoria, bouncing off the walls as they lurch down the halls of learning, their great big brains making them top-heavy and hard to manoeuvre.

Except it's not true, is it? The big brains themselves say none of us need fret about maxing out our memory potential.

"We don't have to worry about running out of space in our lifetime," wrote Paul Reber, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, in a piece for Scientific American.

The brain employs a billion neurons, each connecting with 1,000 neurons, the neurons combining with one another to exponentially increase memory capacity to something like 2.5 petabytes, which I thought were Purina dog snacks, but turn out to be a million gigabytes.

"For comparison, if your brain worked like a digital video recorder in a television, 2.5 petabytes would be enough to hold three million hours of TV shows," Reber wrote.

"You would have to leave the TV running continuously for more than 300 years to use up all the storage."

This is both comforting and alarming. Nice to know that knowledge doesn't come down to a Sophie's Choice, to having to decide between learning, say, who invented the cat door (Sir Isaac Newton) or whether elephants can jump (they can't). But sad to realize that you forgot Valentine's Day is coming not because you have too much other data coming in, but because you're a wiener.

These are the things you learn in the middle of the night when you can't sleep and deadline is approaching anyway.

Some more 4 a.m. facts:

- Ninety per cent of British Columbia men over age 65 still have a driver's licence, but only 67 per cent of women.

- Golf nut Bob Hope used to like to pitch and putt around room 330 of The Empress because he liked its "turf."

- One in every five Canadians has a tattoo. That includes a nation-high 28 per cent of British Columbians.

- Americans will eat 1.25 billion chicken wings today, Super Bowl Sunday. That's four per person. No word on what they're doing with the legs.

By the way, that question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? It was the egg. Since birds are descended from reptiles, the first one must have come from an egg laid by a reptile.

You're welcome.

jknox@timescolonist.com