It’s often funny when you’ll trying to recall something, it makes you go crazy but you can’t recall even if your life depended on it. And then bam, the next day when you’re taking a stroll in the park, it’s suddenly there. What exactly happens here?
In: Biology
Your brain works, generally speaking, by pattern-matching and sensation-reassembly. Basically, when you learn anything, your brain remembers which parts of it were active at the same time; when you later remember something, it activates the same parts to reconstruct the sensation.
So, in your example, if you learned something while outdoors and then later you go outdoors, your mind is experiencing similar sensations, so it’s more likely to find the memory. Or, if whatever you’re trying to remember has some association to “blue” and I say the word “blue,” you might be prompted to remember it. You could visualize it like a path; if your mind is in a similar state, you’re nearer to the start of the path that you can walk to reconstruct the memory.
Brains don’t act anything like files on a computer.
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