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
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.
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.
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…
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.
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.
This triggered a question in me. Can the brain form vivid memories that didn’t really happened?
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