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 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.
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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