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
Some great answers already. I’m just going to point out the following, as an addendum to those:
Similar to the feeling that you can “always find something when you’re not looking for it but can never find it when you need it” you will always have some memory that you are able to access, so it seems easy to recall random stuff because literally any memory other than the one you are trying to pull up will be a “random” memory.
Likewise, you never notice any of the tons of random memories that you wouldn’t be able to pull up if you’d tried because you’re not trying to remember any of them.
It’s not easier for the brain to remember random stuff than stuff you want to remember. You just never struggle to remember random stuff you don’t care about, so it seems like the things you want to remember are more of a struggle than they really are.
It’s like having a bag of 1000 Skittles and every one is a different color. Finding one specific color is going to be difficult and time consuming. Finding any random color is easy because you can just pull a Skittle out of the bag and it’ll be some color or other. Finding your specific Skittle is hard, but there is nothing special about the color of that Skittle that makes it harder to find than any other one that you’re able to pull out.
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