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

If you understand how HTML works, memory is very similar. Every website isn’t a static image, but something that is dynamically recreated every time it is accessed. There is a central code that basically says “pull together this smell, and this feeling, and this visual for this memory program”. The memory program is the gist of what happened at event X.

Every memory we recall is not an act of reproduction, but an act of reconstruction. To make the system more efficient, the program gets updated every time you run the code. Similarities across events get integrated into a single program or into sub-routines for a specific program.

That updating is the same reason that memorization is a bitch. When you access the program to reconstruct the memory, your brain basically says, “It’s like this… ish.”