At times, apparently mundane memories are really easy to recall, and moments you think ‘I want to remember this in detail, even gonna do an eye-camera pan of the scene’ don’t come back that easy. Why?
In: Biology
The first ELI5 I enter – no answers. Something I won’t forget! Maybe moments that seem simple are unique in a way after all.
For instance, why can I recall every line and detail of Tommy Boy but forget important work deadlines that I tell myself, “Don’t forget this!”
When I was around fourteen years old , about thirty five years ago, I had this same question. As an experiment I made a deliberate aren’t to create a mundane memory. At the moment I was taking out the garbage, carrying the bin down out sloped driveway on a fall day. I guess it didn’t work.
I don’t really know but this is my guess:
When you remember an old memory you don’t remember when it actually happened you remember the last time you remembered it, that’s why things look better and more nostalgic with time you remember the joy you had when it happened and the joy you felt when you last remembered it what makes you think the memory was better than it actually was and it would make you more happy then when you last remembered it and next time you’ll remember it you’ll be happier and happier what makes nostalgia so good. The same thing works with that cringey thing you did 5 years ago. Plus it’s common for the brain to link between memories and emotions so when you’re happy you’ll remember the last time you’ve been happy, when you’re sad you’ll remember when you’ve been sad and you get the idea. So if you’re really bored and there’s absolutely nothing going your brain will be like “hay remember the last time we’ve been bored?” And since you remember the last time you thought on the memory and not the actual memory the memory of “that time we’ve been bored” is much more recent then it actually is which makes a really boring and old memory easy to remember. So when you’ll be bored next year you’ll be able to easily remember the time you’ve been bored 3 years ago (notice how I said bored way too many times and you remembered a time you’ve been bored)
Again I’m not sure in anything I just said so if you bring that in a conversation and make a fool out of yourself it’s your fault
I feel it’s probably based on chance. Though our brain does a good job at recognising what to memorise, sometimes it fails at it… and it just happens to be that something unimportant is remembered clearly. Another reason could be that this seemingly unimportant memory (when it was part of temporary fresh memory) was revised while talking to someone. This revision of a memory causes it to be remembered very well by the brain.
Because they’re not actually mundane, they’re profound.
They just seem to be mundane because they’re linked to deep parts of our mind that we aren’t entirely concious of.
For example:
My tax return is very important. Yet I cant remember what it looks like, where I left it and what code I’m supposed to write on it.
My friends teddy bear is not important, yet I can remember its name, the texture of its fur, its colouring, the expression on its face, whats written on its little shirt, even what it smells like and roughly how much it weighs when you pick it up. All in vivid detail.
What’s going on here?
As far as my brain is concerned the tax return is just a piece of paper. The function it serves is a means to an end.
The teddy bear is something way more profound, It has a personal name, a face, it’s the size and shape of a human baby.
So immediately all these qualities start lighting up a deep part of my brain, connections start being made, hormones released, my brain automatically projects a personality on to it. As far as the primitive part of my brain is concerned it *is* a real life human baby, even though my rational mind knows it’s just a ball of wool and stuffing.
The teddy bear is linked to human identity, culture, emotion….
The tax return is….well, a tax return.
Which one is more likely to imprint a memory?
All seemingly good answers especially about forming memories based on external stimuli. Smells are often very good catalyst for memory formation as well. Like how when you smell chocolate cake baking, and it triggers a memory of a birthday you really enjoyed where you also enjoyed chocolate cake. The brain (not unlike a drug addict) is always looking to feed the dopamine receptors. Even if it only a fleeting memory.
The mundane is easy.
Novel moments aren’t easily expressed. They’re fleeting, transients, that slip from grip.
If you really want to remember something spectacular, you need to put your brain into write mode.
You just absorb it. Don’t think about how much you want to remember it, or you’ll just remember wanting to remember it.
Live it fully, without question or hesitation and it’ll last forever. Be careful though, you might start preferring the past to the present. That’s not helpful in any way. So be sure to keep looking forwards.
The actual mechanics of memory formation aren’t really being mentioned so far, which surprises me. I highly recommend some popular neuroscience like Steven Pinker for a deeper dive on this subject, but here’s a what-I-remember gist: memories and other mental structure are formed by groups of neurons that ‘learn’ to fire in a certain way through repetitive use, like a line on an etch-a-sketch that won’t erase any more. The beauty of the brain is that one bit of circuitry can be part of many different total pathways and it’s all kind of modular and interconnected, but the important thing here is that neurons are plastic, they can reset and be reused like the grains in an etch-a-sketch, and when you think or experience something trivial they very quickly stop firing in the pattern it stimulated and are ready to be repurposed. This is why you can forget something after 30 seconds, and why your head isn’t full of literally decades of minutiae. To only keep the good stuff, the higher order ‘software’ of your brain has systems that rank and prioritize experiences and thoughts, and ones that meet its criteria are reinforced by repetition.
This reinforcement is key, and you’ll sometimes be aware of it happening. Read something once and never think about it again, and you’ll definitely forget it. What do you do if you really need to remember, say, a license plate or phone number? Keep saying it to yourself. It works: as the pathways are repeatedly fired, the groups of neurons corresponding to that thought get trained, and fire in that pattern more readily when stimulated again in the future. A memory is formed. It’s also associative, as one ‘group’ or ‘pattern’ can trigger another, hence always thinking of the same movie quote or song when you pick up a particular object or visit a particular place. These links can be arbitrary to begin with, like thinking “toothbrush – bat cleaning meme – bats – Batman” but if you think it enough times, it becomes permanent, and suddenly toothbrush = Batman forever, however hard you try to dissociate it.
Side note: this is why we should take trauma and PTSD more seriously than we naturally might – it isn’t just trauma victims ‘getting their feelings hurt’, it’s more physical and deep than that – stimuli can set off these associations and then they’re actually having a flashback, their brain reliving a horrific memory in detail, firing all the corresponding neuron groups at once, freaking them out. It’s a different kind of remembering to when you try to remember the colour of a car you once owned.
Which brings us to the other side of it, and your question. If memories are formed by repetitive stimulation of groups, like reciting a license plate, why do we spontaneously remember some things without trying to, like trauma? To say they “make an impression” is kind of circular, but accurate. Impressive experiences or ideas get obsessed over by your mind, consciously or otherwise. Against your will, your mind simply decides that the thought is important, and recites it. These subroutines come to the fore when your brain is unoccupied, which I believe is why you sit at 2am suddenly thinking about unresolved traumatic or disturbing things in your past. Your mind is still quietly obsessing over them, rewriting them more and more deeply into your brain. I presume this is how we get to having neuroses and anxiety: circular thought patterns that happen too easily precisely because they have been trodden many, many times. (This may also weigh into the culture war arguments about microaggressions: in neurological terms, a small repeated stimulus really does have a larger impact than the sum of its parts, but I’m unqualified to comment further.)
Why does your mind do this automatic memorizing and obsessing? Since the mind and brain have been meticulously crafted by natural selection, the answer is fairly obvious: it confers a survival advantage. The tribesman who narrowly avoids getting mauled by a tiger and then spends weeks subconsciously obsessing over it, memorizing and internalizing the experience, is more ready to react and run next time than the tribesman who happily forgets about it and sleeps peacefully, never giving it a second thought. This is why we shouldn’t be too angry at our minds for having this obsessive quality: it keeps us safe and makes us remember things likely to make us feel strong positive and negative emotions, which in turn makes us more equipped to seek and avoid them in the future, improving our odds of happiness. Even if it does sometimes overshoot and leave us sitting up at night, worrying about someone who bullied us 20 years ago.
Postscript: the missing detail in my reading so far is which triggers set off this process of prioritization. What makes your mind choose certain things for reinforcement? How does it know a tiger attack is more noteworthy than a stroll on the beach, and why do random things sometimes meet the criteria? I suspect it involves emotion. The stronger the cocktail of emotions stimulated, the more it ranks. But that is only a guess, maybe others can expand.
When I was a teenager, one day I was on my bike, riding across the street. A bus drove past me and a speck of dust or grit or something got in my eye. I pulled over, took a moment to get it out and distinctly remember thinking, “I will always remember this moment.” And I do! Not every day, but it comes back a couple times a year. (I think?)
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