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
I’m going to answer this from a functional prospective and According to the cue specificity principal–the likelihood of retrieving a memory increases as the match between cues at recall and encoding increase.
Everyday events/memories seem easy to recall because the likelihood of having a large amount of cues (environment, emotion, smell, visual, touch, etc.) is high between encoding and time of recall.
Effortful encoding/recall of information is more difficult because that information usually has few cues at encoding and thus few cues at time of recall. For example, reading from a book only has visual cues of the words and maybe contextual cues of the room and internal states of when you read the material.
According to the encoding specificity principal, you need to recreate these cues at time of recall in order to remember the memory. Thus, you should think back to reading the book. Try to visualize the pages in your minds eye…
Everyday memories don’t need this technique because of the vast number of cues involved at encoding of them.
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