The Marvels and Mysteries of Memory: Understanding Our Brain's Design
Your brain is amazing. Every day, it performs a myriad miracles— it sees, hears, tastes, smells, and senses touch. It also feels pain, pleasure, temperature, stress, and a wide range of emotions. It plans things and solves problems. It knows where you are in space so you don't bump into walls or fall down when you step off a curb to cross the street. It comprehends and produces language. It mediates your desire for chocolate and sex, your ability to empathize with the joy and suffering of others, and an awareness of your own existence. And it can remember. Of all the complex and wondrous miracles that your brain executes, memory is king.
You need memory to learn anything. Without it, information and experiences can't be retained. New people would remain strangers. You wouldn't be able to remember the previous sentence by the end of this one. You depend on memory to call your mother later today and to take your heart medication before you go to bed tonight. You need memory to get dressed, brush your teeth, read these words, play tennis, and drive your car. You use your memory from the moment you wake up until the moment you go to sleep, and even then, your memory processes are busy at work.
The significant facts and moments of your life strung together create your life's narrative and identity. Memory allows you to have a sense of who you are and who you've been. If you've witnessed someone stripped bare of his or her personal history by Alzheimer's disease, you know firsthand how essential memory is to the experience of being human.
But for all its miraculous, necessary, and pervasive presence in our lives, memory is far from perfect. Our brains aren't designed to remember people's names, to do something later, or to catalog everything we encounter. These imperfections are simply the factory settings. Even in the smartest of heads, memory is fallible. A man famous for memorizing more than a hundred thousand digits of pi can also forget his wife's birthday or why he walked into his living room.
In fact, most of us will forget the majority of what we experience today by tomorrow. Added up, this means we actually don't remember most of our lives. How many days, in full, specific detail, can you remember from last year? Most people recall an average of only eight to ten. That's not even 3 percent of what you experienced from your recent past. You remember even less from five years ago.
And much of what we do remember is incomplete and in-accurate. Our memories for what happened are particularly vulnerable to omissions and unintentional editing.
Memory is quite economical. In a nutshell, our brains have evolved to remember what is meaningful. They forget what isn't. The truth is, much of our lives are habitual, routine, and inconsequential.
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We shower, brush our teeth, drink coffee, commute to work, do our jobs, eat lunch, commute home, eat dinner, watch TV, spend too much time on social media, and go to bed. Day after day. We can't remember anything about the load of laundry we did last week. And that's OK. Most of the time, forgetting isn't actually a problem to solve.
We would probably all agree that forgetting our tenth kiss, last week's laundry, what we ate for lunch on Wednesday, and which way the queen is facing on a penny isn't such a big deal. These moments and details aren't particularly significant. However, our brains also forget plenty of things we do care about. I would very much like to remember to return my daughter's overdue library book, why I just walked into the kitchen, and where I put my glasses. These things matter to me. In these instances, we often forget not because it's efficient for our brains to do so but because we haven't supplied our brains with the kinds of input needed to support memory creation and retrieval. These garden-variety memory failures are normal outcomes of our brains' design.
But we seldom think of them this way because most of us aren't familiar with our memory's owner's manual.
Source - Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting by Lisa Genova