: How do we forget something easily even if we try to remember it as hard as we can, but the same thing comes to our mind when we are not even thinking about it?

Question

: How do we forget something easily even if we try to remember it as hard as we can, but the same thing comes to our mind when we are not even thinking about it?

In:

Answer 1

Lucky you , I was teaching some 6th graders about this last week.

So memory has three parts : encoding (putting the memory in your brain), storage (having that memory in a specific area), and retrieval (getting that memory back)

Most memory issues start at the start [encoding] because we aren’t paying ATTENTION. but you aren’t talking about that even though ATTENTION is the most important thing about memory. You want to know even if we pay ATTENTION, why can we still not remember it as well as something we supposedly didn’t pay ATTENTION to.

Well /that/ comes to [storage]. Have you ever made a word map? Where you write a word, circle it, and then connect a few words that are related to that, circle each of those and repeat the process with them? {I.e. (boat)–(water)–(fish)–(bass)–(guitar)} that’s how our brain kinda works . You take a memory and it becomes connected to related things. So if you think of those related things we can get to the memory. {Think trying to remember someone’s name and going: “oh it’s the same name as that girl who fell down that rabbit hole…. ALICE}
Memories are always connected. When we actively try to give it more connections thats called mnemonics. {Making acronyms, initialisms, songs, etc. } The best memories in the world use things like the peg system or the method of loci.

But sometimes the memory is already connected to a bunch of stuff. I remember the number of Pokémon in the first generation without effort because I have loads of memories connected to it {playing with the cards, watching the show, doing the rap, etc.} So really the foundation was already laid.

Alternatively it could just have been very intense and Thus the mind kind of burns it into your mind like a flash bulb.

TL;Dr Usually it’s cause you don’t pay attention but how you store that memory is important too. The more memories you have related to the thing the easier it is to remember it.