Why do people sometimes forget what they came into a room to get or do, but remember it a couple of hours later completely unprompted?
In: 295
We have a certain amount of working memory, which is basically the amount of space we have in our brains to hold what we’re currently thinking about. This is what RAM in computers is modeled after! Like computers, we also have another section of our memory that’s like a hard drive. Not immediately accessible, and more like long term storage.
We have a very limited amount of working memory, and our brains are always needing to decide what to discard in order to make space for new things that we need to hold in working memory. When you walk into a new room there’s a rush of new and presently relevant information that your brain wants to prioritize, and sometimes the information it decides to kick out is the task you wanted to accomplish. So you no longer have that task in working memory.
That task is still in your long term memory, but in order to get something out of our long term memory it basically needs to get triggered, it’s no longer immediately available. You’ll remember in a couple hours when something happens to trigger the recall of that particular memory/task.
This is oversimplified but this is the basic idea!
Latest Answers