I was thinking how sometimes when you’re looking for something and eventually find it, you then remember leaving there.
So my question is, why do we forget certain stuff. Specially since certain triggers will bring those memories back meaning they never actually left our memory.
In: 11
oversimplified: your brain cleans out memories it doesn’t need all the time. we only have so much “storage” for memories, so our brain gets rid of things it doesn’t need. what you ate for breakfast 5 years ago, every time you pissed 3 days ago, etc.
memories are just sequences of neurons being activated in a certain way. after a time of said neurons not being fired, or “remembered”, the link degrades.
the more you remember a certain memory, the more the neural bond strengthens. over time it may degrade and some parts get forgotten or changed.
tldr; neural bonds degrade over time, and the brain cleans out unused files it doesn’t need.
Because we have [selective attention](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJG698U2Mvo).
Our brains forget (disregard) A LOT of what we see, hear, smell, touch, etc. Your eyes and ears send a constant feed of information to your brain, and it’s A LOT of information that you don’t really need. Colors, make/model of all cars passing by. The faces of everyone in a crowd, their clothes, etc. You don’t NEED all of this information so the brain pretty much drops it (forgets it) as soon as it gets it (from your eyes).
So as a result, memory functions based on importance, on triggers. Loud noises, shocking things happening to you, changes from “normal” are what you’ll memorize, what the brain will pay attention to.
A memory is something that set off multiple parts of the brain. Take someone playing a Base in front of a crowd for the first time. That memory is made up of the five senses, what they could see from the stage, what they heard as they strummed the instrument, how the strings felt under their fingers, how hot the lights where, and their nervousness of the moment. All that together is a memory. The more senses that are trigged during the memory, or a memory with a high emotional tag are the ones that get saved.
The less senses involved the harder it is to pull that memory back.
While you build memories all the time, in your late ages you will find most of your memories will be around your teen through early 20s then slowly tapering off.
Engram cells are an ensemble of neurons where memories are physically stored.
When you activate the ensembles, the memory that is stored is recalled.
Forgetting occurs when the engram cells can not be reactivated. The memories are still there, but the engrams cannot be activated, thus the memories cannot be recalled.
Forgetting sometimes involves changing the neural circuits from an accessible (activating) to an inaccessible (no reactivation). And when you suddenly remember, the opposite happens, the inaccessible circuits become accessible. This is normal.
In dementia, it is believed that these circuits are taken over and cannot be converted to accessible, thus the memory cannot be recalled.
I think we are one of the only animals that can think about things that aren’t there beyond the abstract
Perfect memory would be awful. Every bad thing you ate, every relationship ended, every toilet visit, as vivid as when they happened? No thanks. Your brain keeps track of what it needs to, and while it’s not perfect (thousands of years ago, humans didn’t need to know where their car keys were), it does a decent job picking what’s important to store in long-term memory.
If you can, read Lois McMaster Bujold’s “Memory”. It’s about a secret agent who got a chip installed that makes him remember literally everything, and it doesn’t go well for him.
Wrong question.
Why do we remember?
We do not have enough space and energy to save everything we experience. Forgetting is a way to get rid of potentially useless information. For the same reason we do not store everything in memory.
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