Do memories get lost permanently when we forget?
In: Biology
Ever heard a song from your childhood? The memories come flooding back
No. Just because we can’t remember that time doesn’t mean awhile later it won’t come back to you.
I’ve had this happen recently when my dad asked me if I remembered when…. That was last week he asked and I remembered this morning what he was talking about but not when he asked.
Perhaps eventually. Memories that you haven’t recalled in a long time tend to get hazier and harder to remember details of over time. But you’ll find that sometimes a specific event will dredge a long-forgotten memory back into mind.
‘Memories’ are merely connections between two phenomenon. Think of it like a road network. The path from your house to the local deli requires taking certain roads. Those roads are your ‘memory’ of the connection between ‘house’ and ‘deli’.
Now imagine that one of those roads you’ve always taken closes. You need to find a new connection between ‘house’ and ‘deli’ using different roads.
Alternatively, someone might build new roads that give you more possibilities to travel between ‘house’ and ‘deli’.
Potentially, *all* the possible roads between ‘house’ and ‘deli’ will be eliminated and you’ll ‘forget’ the association between the two.
There was a story of a 88 year old woman who kept hearing this humming tune in her head and of a woman singing to her. The doctor who was treating her determined it was an Irish lullaby popular when she would have been an infant. She never knew her mother for reasons but she was Irish. The doctor believed it was a memory of her mother singing to her when she was an infant. So the first time she remembers hearing her mother’s voice was when she was 88years old being sung lullabies. He diagnosed her with a minor stroke deep in her brain, not the kind that causes paralysis since it was in the wrong spot. As the treatment for the stroke progressed and she got better she was slowly unable to hear her mother sing to her anymore.
Here’s a link to npr about it with some audio that I heard on Radiolab originally.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=17261330
This isn’t an answer but a clue. I get ketamine infusion therapy for chronic pain twice a year or so. When I first started out I had five shorter infusions where I essentially tripped balls…under medical supervision. Those first several had me remember so many mundane things from my childhood and they were really vivid. I talked to my siblings about them and they were all accurate memories. I’ve been reading about micro dosing with psilocybin and that it can have similar effects of improving recent and long past memories. I think Oakland, CA even legalized it along with some parts of Canada. The science on this is going to change as more legitimate studies are done.
The answer is that no one knows.
We don’t know how memory works, why some people have better memories than others, why some memories disappear and others don’t. We just don’t know.
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