What is the psychology behind forgetting something? How does the brain suddenly remember something you hadn’t thought about in years?
In: Biology
This may be very out of date, because college was WAY too long ago. But, in my neuro-psych class, one of the accepted frameworks for how the brain worked was the “spreading activation model.” Think of it like a lightning strike that goes off in your brain, with each fork of the lightning being a different neuron. When you have a have a thought, it sparks off all of the other related neurons, which spark off other neurons, and it kinda cascades out like that. Everything that is lit up is associated with the original thought, and it is remembered.
But some things don’t have a lot of pathways there. If I asked you to remember a random date, you may draw a blank. There’s not a lot of linked pathways in your brain to that specific date, so nothing really fires. However, let’s say that was the date that an important event in your life. It could be a good event (like a first date, or a new job, or something), it could be a “bad” event (death of a loved one, divorce, etc).
Suddenly, you may have a whole lot of activation, and remember random things. You may suddenly think about or even see the couch that was in the room where the event happened. That couch wasn’t very important normally, but for some reason it’s related to the memory, and now you think about it.
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