What is the psychology behind forgetting something? How does the brain suddenly remember something you hadn’t thought about in years?
In: Biology
As my psyche professor put it “the brain stores memories as clues, not information when it’s not procedural memory”.
It’s a chain of associations, an emotion, an image, a feeling or a smell can trigger your memory. Smell and touch are strong due to evolution (the olfactory nerves bypass most executive functions of the brain, that’s why you’ll react to a bad smell faster than a bad image).
If you have a weak connection to an event (or it’s routine) you can do things like put your keys down and then forget where you did it. Your brain made a decision that something else was important or you were preoccupied with something and that memory goes away.
But the smell of a marker could cause your brain to make connections that make you remember grade school. As
[JesterBarelyKnowHer](https://www.reddit.com/user/JesterBarelyKnowHer/) put it, the “lighting strike” causes related neurons to fire. Thus a smelly marker leads you to thinking about 3rd period English and that test you bombed.
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