What is the psychology behind forgetting something? How does the brain suddenly remember something you hadn’t thought about in years?
In: Biology
Disclaimer: FAR from an expert.
As I’ve generally through about it. A memory is essentially an electrical current routed a certain way through the brains grey matter (neurons).A certain sequence of neurons activated by a passing current is the mechanism for both the original “memory” to be recorded, the same path of neurons are fired each time you recall something.
The brain being an absolute universe worth of these pathways, the chances of randomly “loosing” a path gets quite high. It’s still chemically there though. Memory is likely about linking together certain pieces of (meta) data. So… rather than having a perfect image of a red bicycle, it’s properties are “remembered” by the sequence of neurons that need to fire to “rebuild” the image in your minds eye.
Strong memories have many “hooks” into them so the red bicycle is associated with: A town you lived it, the person who gave it you or who you spent time with about it and all the links going out from that in a tangled mess of bits of data that are parts of different memories. At the point something else causes a particular neuron to fire, there’s a chance an “old” activation pathway through the network of neurons is fired and you recall an old memory.
I’m sure there’s an AWFUL lot more to it than that and asking the question on a more technical level probably would get a lot more depth/etc but… that always seemed sensible to me as to how the brain likely works. It’s a collection of billions, upon billions of neurons. I’d think as you learn new “properties” of objects they’re stored and organised down to a pretty minuscule level and recall is the electrical part of the brain re-linking each of these properties into a memory/object/skill/picture/thought.
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