why our brains can form arbitrary memories from seemingly random events and recall them perfectly but its hard to memorize something when you are intentionally trying to memorize it?

Question

why our brains can form arbitrary memories from seemingly random events and recall them perfectly but its hard to memorize something when you are intentionally trying to memorize it?

In: Biology

Answer 1

Memory can be divided into many types, the main two being episodic and semantic. Episodic is memory for ‘episodes’, or experiential memories, whereas semantic is factual memory devoid of context. Semantic memories tend to form when information is common to lots of episodic memory, this then becomes a ‘fact’ which can be separated from context. Therefore you need to see a stimulus many times to form semantic memory, whereas the brain is designed to form episodic memories quickly.

There’s a hot debate in neuroscience as to whether semantic memories can be formed independently of episodic memories. Either way, the majority of the brains ‘memory machinery’ is designed to form episodic memories not semantic.