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
We’re primarily wired to remember good things like a moment worth reliving or how good food tastes. As well as bad things like fire will burn us or that time Karen was an asshole to us. Anything without a survival aspect or without a strong emotional response attached is just filler to our brains. The needs we want to remember are different than the needs we evolved to remember. Try studying while eating a really good meal. Then eat the same meal before you need to recall info. Helps.
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.”
While there are many great technical answers on this thread, a simpler answer may be a process known as “survivorship bias”. It seems so much harder to memorize things on purpose because you’re much more likely to notice when you forget (like on a test). Random memories that seem to appear out of nowhere usually have no reason to be challenged. In truth, almost all of the fine details of most people’s lives are forgotten fairly quickly. Our memories often fill in the gaps when it’s not so important to remember every detail.
Your brain is always processing and remembering information. In the world, there are sometimes memory cues that trigger those memories – smell is particularly known for this. In contrast, when trying to remember something complex, there aren’t really natural memory cues outside of “I need to remember this” when it comes time to actually remember it. Plus, what you’re trying to remember is much more concrete and precise, as opposed to the incomplete memories or feelings of “random events.”
Also, your arbitrary memories probably aren’t actually perfectly recalled even if you feel like they are – memories are heavily influenced by cues and reprocessed at the time of retrieval 🙂
Your memory is actually really terrible. And studies show that every time you recall a memory it actually gets “rewritten.” There are tricks to help you memorize that have been employed and used for centuries such as putting an a list of items or numbers in places you’re familiar. For example if you have a grocery list you can mentally walk through your home and a put a carton of milk on your table, put a stick of butter on the couch, bread on the TV, and so on…
Real answer: those “memories” you’re recalling “perfectly” of seemingly random events aren’t really memories. They’re more like forensic reconstructions based on related data.
As an example, let’s say you went to Disneyland with your family when you were 8 and had a great time.
When you recall having a great time at Disneyland(your emotional response) your brain starts pulling information that was *probably true* to build a memory of your day at Disneyland. You loved a specific Mickey Mouse shirt when you were a kid so you brain says “hey, we love that shirt and it’s on theme so we were probably wearing that shirt.” Next, you loved funnel cake as a kid so your brain says “Funnel cake would have made that day good so we probably had funnel cake.” And your brain continues this reconstruction until you have your “perfect memory.” In reality you actually wore a plain black t-shirt because you left the Mickey one at home by accident and Disneyland didn’t even sell funnel cake when you were 8.
“But I recalled it perfectly! It can’t be a reconstruction, I wouldn’t be this sure of the sequence of events!”
Confidence in the accuracy of ones own recall has effectively 0 correlation with the accuracy of that recall. It’s why “eye witness testimony” it so fucking terrible.
The brains memory “creator” the hippocampus is literally attached to the emotional center of the brain, the amygdala. The amygdala “tags” the memory in the hippocampus with certain emotions and sensations, so when the memory is stored in the brain it has that tag. When you smell, hear, etc. a sound similar to the tag that the amygdala gave its causes the memory to pop up.
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