• Question: You forget certain memories over time, but does your brain still have the original memory stored somewhere? And does your brain have certain memories that you never thought you had? Eg you remember a day where you did something 2 years back.And you didn't remember it?

    Asked by ibelieveinkarma to Jimmy, Niall on 22 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Niall Crawford

      Niall Crawford answered on 22 Mar 2013:

      Our memories can be selective in what they take in, our minds have adapted to note certain things and ignore others, it’s one of the reasons we can read so fast. The brain does store memories, and sometimes you won’t be reminded of until it is triggered by a certain stimuli like a smell or sound. Unfortunately, this can make it hard to be selective about what you remember.

    • Photo: James Holloway

      James Holloway answered on 22 Mar 2013:

      The neurons in your brain do not get replaced when they die, they are there to last you a lifetime. This is one of the reasons that brain trauma is hard to recover from. I think there are two levels of forgetting something in this context.

      You can forget where you put your keys, and when you find them think ‘silly me now i remember’. In this case the memory was always there, you just didn’t have access to it at the time. You’d of probably remembered when you were on your way to work where you put them.

      Then there is the forgetting of say a person’s face over years and years. Although you remember the person, what they were like and the core memory remains, the details have been lost.

      The brain definately has a whole host of memorys that I don’t know I have as i type this. An old friend of mine will talk to me about childhood adventures and it will all come flooding back. Or i’ll hear a song I used to listen too while playing a certain computer game and i’ll suddenly be able to tell you about the relative resource costs on Total Annihilation.

      The brains a funny thing!

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