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 would be interested in the discussion of Neurotypical vs Autistic individuals for this. I believe it has everything to do with emotion and emotional connection and not having that connection means there is no long-term storage as a fairly neutral encounter isn’t needed for survival and if it is that’s everyone’s default so your brain is slightly blunted as a result.
From my experience, on the autism side I find my memories that are easiest to recall are either the most painful memories or the happiest/content moments of my life. If I visualize the moment I can recreate it in my brain which in turn recreates the emotion or feeling I had at the moment. This is one of the reasons why pictures of me are hard, I immediately can remember exactly what was happening at that very second 90% of the time.
I find that if you don’t have something ’emotional’ bound to a memory it doesn’t really stick, sort of like a memory is a byte of RAM and unless you save it to the Hard Drive the next time that RAM byte is needed the computer is going to replace it and forget about it. I find Deja Vu is also running on this same system, it’s not a memory that I am living through again it’s a subconscious state of mind that is similar and triggers the feeling of dejavu either due to a smell or a thought pattern triggering the mindstate.
Honestly, I found doing mushrooms helped with this, and meditation or mindfulness exercises. You’re all going to write me off as a crazy tripping autistic redditor but I’m dead serious – take mushrooms and try to remember hard to remember memories.
If you want to try it the simplest exercise I can explain is to close your eyes, find some music you like and relax, when relaxed imagine you’re in a box or a rectangle or a ship or something you can visualize, now imagine on the other side of the barrier of whatever you created is absolutely nothing, the vast emptiness of space, a black hole, dark matter, whatever you want to signify to your brain that your imagination can fill in this spot, now fill it in with a memory you like and imagine you’re either going up to the barriers edge and looking more closely, controlling it more like a camera in a video game with the ability to control time or however it functions with your brain. I find in this exercise the more emotional you or someone else was the easier it is to remember, so as an example a bully calling you a name, this is easy to remember if you endured it a lot but only because it invokes an emotional response which is remembered for survival.
Mushrooms and meditation.
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