I’m talking about those things that you normally know but may forget momentarily. It’s like your brain draws a blank or can’t access the info. What causes that when it happens?
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Good question. Sometimes I can remember the name of an obscure actor from a film nobody watched, other days I strain to remember my close friends kids names.
What were we talking about?
Memories have physical locations, just like a picture in a folder on your PC.
If you have a name of something on the tip of your tongue then you still have it in memory but you can’t seem to find where it is stored. Also often times the longer you spend trying to find it the memories that are saved in similar locations start to keep opening like pop-ups on your screen you didn’t ask for. So sometimes you give up and it randomly pops up in your head at dinner after all the other related pop ups finally go away
All actions by the brain are achieved by neurons firing. This means through all its inputs it received sufficient impulses to give off an impulse itself.
When you draw a blank, at least one neuron on the path does not fire. Those neurons often change their wiring. So perhaps a signal got diluted.
By reading up the name, you retrain those neurons and if the wiring is stable enough, the next time you remember the name.
Most depictions of the brain show a library with memory books that can be pulled out whenever you want. However, a more accurate depiction of memory as strings of information. You keep pulling at the string to get more information about a subject.
An example is the alphabet song. It’s easy to start at a letter and continue to sing the song as you pull the string along. However, it’s very difficult to go in reverse or compare two separate letters without singing the song since the memories are stored in one direction!
For information about a person, your brain first matches its sensory information to a particular string. The person’s build, facial features, movements, sound, even smell help us find a particular string that indicates we know this person. Then we start pulling on the string to get more stored information.
However, sometimes when you pull the string, you end up with an empty string end. Memory strings are strengthened from use but will weaken or break if not used. Furthermore, when your brain is organizing memories, it can accidentally break a few strings. When you can’t pull up the information from the string, you literally draw a blank.
Thankfully, once you’re reminded of the name, your brain can reattach the missing name string to the person and it helps you recall other information attached to the name.
Imagine living in a forest for your entire life, wandering around and making paths. Some paths, like to the nearest water source, you will take over and over again and they will become permanent. Paths that you only take a few times a year won’t be as easy to take again and will get overgrown with time. Some paths may overlap each other making navigation confusing. When you blank on a name it means your brain couldn’t find the right path at that moment.
I think my wiring is screwed up. When I can’t think of someone’s name I always get a picture of a banana in my mind’s eye.
ps, this is why the game show Jeopardy gives the answers and you have to go in question form. Some people, (like me), know the answer fully to the point where we visualize it perfectly in our mind, but the names just go out of our heads sometimes. Jeopardy doesn’t punish those people.
it finds space in the plain
that gets washed by the rain?
I feel like a lot of people are talking about theories, but in fact we do not have a consensus on how memory works.
There are multiple theories of memory supported by different scientists.
One says that when you can’t remember something, it is either corrupted, forgotten or incomplete.
One says that you didn’t try to remember hard enough.
One says that you might have stuff in your working memory that either prevents you or makes it too hard to recall something.
Overall we do not have a definitive answer because no memory theory has been able to explain all related phenomena. I think that the most universally accepted one ATM is Working Memory with all of its addons and special cases added over decades after its formulation. And that would be the last answer.
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