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
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Just re watched the movie “the music never stopped” this evening and coincidentally read this post just after. Emotions, sounds, hearing, music…
Evolution made our brains to function as a survival tool. Therefore we tend to remember things that are attached to our emotions. This allowed early humans to remember the dangers of their environment, remember which plants are poisonous and which ones are healthy etc.
Edit: typos
It is also quite easy to interpret. So called stop motion which your brain sees in seconds and for even less time gets saved into your subconsciousness more than into you realizing and actively understanding what you just saw.
It is also a great way to ‘program’ and even ‘re-program’ your dream when you do such excessive some hours before the sleep. Making quick ‘snaps’ with your eyes over a picture, closing them just after you opened and then again in a different succession of pictures or whatever you want. Can even be your pet, a person, your car, your boobies in the mirror, whatever you want!
Your dreams will for sure have those ‘saved’ pictures actively involved in the action.
Where I know it from? Former scientist. I also almost never had normal dreams in my 60+ years on earth. Only lucid dreaming for me.. I used the said techniques to manipulate my own dreams, too. You know what they say: scientists like to play with their own toys, which in this case is your own ol’ dreaming.
I’ve had memories pop up with doing certain things that have nothing to do with what I’m doing. For example when I’m at work filling out a certain report. Having to fill up my tank at the gasoline station comes up with an image of my wife’s cousin. I can’t explain why these 2 things pop up. Another is I’m raking leaves on my yard and my son’s pop Warner football team and coach always come to mind doing this chore. I just don’t get it.
Write down everything you want to memorize on paper, by hand. Repeat it to yourself out loud over, and over, and over again.
Then burn the paper you wrote everything on.
Now rewrite it all from memory.
Weirdly ties into a description of why childhood time seems to be slower than adult time. I read that it was basically that they had more ‘time stamps’ I translate that as more memory points. Could be explained by easier emotional fluctuations. As an adult there seems to be less ‘time stamps’ so maybe we just don’t flip emotions so quickly and especially if affected by depression. Man.. Being grown up is rubbish.
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.
I’m kind of the opposite. I can remember and pick up technical things at work really fast and remember them.
Don’t ask me what we talked about 5 minutes ago though.
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.
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