I dont know, if i even worded this right.
But i have this recurring memory(flashback?) Of the ONE time i went to speech therapy when i was like 4 or 5.
I cant even remember what i ate last week but i remember this vividly as if it just happened but its been 11 or 12 years.
How does that work? Why does this happen?
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To my knowledge, memory and how memories are stored and accessed are still subject to a lot of scientific debate.
But the principle is essentially the same when accessing older memories vs newer memories, an older memory may stick out to you more if you remember it constantly (say your recurring memory) and by exercising that neural pathway, you strengthen it meaning you remember it even more.
Also yet to be mentioned is how feeble our memories of far back events even are. VSauce in particular does an excellent job showing this phenomenon where he implants false memories within some test subjects and they truly believe those events happened! (It appears this particular mind field episode im referring to is behind a youtube paywall so I don’t have a link for you).
First of all, you are probably remembering memories of remembering it rather than the memory itself. Other than that, the way our brains are wired makes us a lot better at remembering some stuff over others. In this case, it’s a lot easier to remember something that happens once rather than one meal out of tens of thousands you had.
For some reason, your brain marked this moment as important, likely for some emotional reaction you had to it. The part of the brain that marks moments as needing to be remembered is the *amygdala*, a tiny almond-shaped bit of brain deep inside the older sections. It sits right next to the *hippocampus*, which is the coordinator of *episodic memory*, or memories that deal with autobiographical events. The amygdala tells the hippocampus when to store a memory, and the hippocampus remembers it. The hippocampus then spends several years writing this memory into the cerebral cortex.
Was it a particularly embarrassing or stressful situation? The brain is constantly taking in sensory information and quickly dumping everything not deemed important. If something emotionally charged happens, larger than normal amounts of acetylcholine, dopamine, and norepinephrine get released in the brain and each play a part in attention, learning, and memory. It’s basically your brain’s version of the Spongebob “Write that down, write that down!” Meme.
It serves an immediate purpose in that the heightened state of alertness and focus allows you to make potentially life saving decisions in a short amount of time, as well as a long term purpose because you don’t have to go through potentially dangerous situations multiple times in order to learn the lesson. Imagine if learning not to burn your hand on a stove required the same amount practice as learning the alphabet.
For the most part you don’t get to decide what you remember, your brain just keeps the things in there that it wants based on how pertinent they seemed at the time, usually because they caused some strong emotion or other
For what it’s worth, I also did a few sessions of speech therapy around the same age, and I also remember it vividly. Even things I know for a fact I wasn’t told about second hand
Not very well. There is evidence that accessing a memory—remembering something—alters the memory. Weird, huh.
https://news.northwestern.edu/stories/2012/09/your-memory-is-like-the-telephone-game
You don’t, at least not like taking a photo and looking it up in an album.
What happens is you’re imagining things you’ve imagined before because some time in the distant past something like that actually happened. If you had a video recording of the memory you’d find that it’s nothing like your memory but at the same time it’s very familiar.
Tldr: memories aren’t
Memory is a performative reiteration of the story of self. Your memory of the event remains (somewhat) fresh because you constantly recall it only to recommit it to memory, this time remembering having remembered it.
My earliest confirmed memory was from only a couple months of age. I have many memories before that and after that. I am not certain, but I may even remember snippets from before birth.
My earliest confirmed memories cluster around 6~10 months of age. By the time I was a bit over a year my memory becomes quite exceptional. I remember my babysitter, the places we went, the people we met, and the frustration of not understanding so much of what was going on in the moment.
I remember my tongue being too big for my mouth, being unable to walk, graduation from diapers, even mundane things like my dad changing a light bulb or him going to work in the morning and coming home the same day.
It’s a common trait in my family, my early memory pales compared to my grandfather.
It was a novel experience. You can remember that moment better because it was significant, and you probably experienced a lot of new stimuli with all of your senses. So not just visual, but touch, smell, sound, etc. the more inputs your brain gets from a new experience. The better it will be at recalling it later.
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