Memory can be a playful thing. It collects minute details from childhood events. Yet leaves us wondering where we left our keys. They've found that forgetting is normal, and actually vital to how the brain works. Here is a look at the strange facts about how people forget things.
In one common but mysterious short-term memory failure, people find themselves in a room, without remembering why they ended up there. In these circumstances, the doorway may be to blame. The very act of walking through a doorway may hint to the brain that a new scene has started and it should store prior memories away, which causes strange memory lapses.
Although rare, certain activities can result in a temporary memory loss and brain fog, called transient global amnesia. People with transient global amnesia suffer no serious side effects, and the memory problems usually disappear in a few hours. But it's not clear how this happens, and brain scans of patients who have had this type of amnesia show no signs of damage to the brain, or signs of stroke.
Our earliest childhood memories fade, and there's likely a reason for that. Most often, people don't recall any memories from their earliest years of life usually before age 3 or 4. This is called infantile amnesia. Recent research shows that children do make memories during their early years, but then forget through deliberate mechanisms. One possible explanation for this is that the developing brain, while growing exponentially and generating cells, wipes out stored memories.
It is possible to lose memories before they even have a chance to become stored, due to injuries in the brain's structures that are specifically involved in handling memory formation, maintenance and recall. Damage to these areas can result in curious forms of amnesia. It's normal to forget things from time to time, and it's normal to become somewhat more forgetful as you age. But how much forgetfulness is too much? How can you tell whether your memory lapses are normal forgetfulness and within the scope of normal aging or are a symptom of something more serious?
Healthy people can experience memory loss or memory distortion at any age. Some of these memory flaws become more pronounced with age, but (unless they are extreme and persistent) they are not considered indicators of Alzheimer's or other memory-impairing illnesses. Below are the different types of memory problems:
1.
Absentmindedness: This type of
forgetting occurs when you don't pay close enough attention. You forget where
you just put your pen because you didn't focus on where you put it in the first
place. You were thinking of something else (or, perhaps, nothing in
particular), so your brain didn't encode the information securely.
Absentmindedness also involves forgetting to do something at a prescribed time,
like taking your medicine or keeping an appointment.
2.
Bias: Even the sharpest memory isn't a flawless
snapshot of reality. In your memory, your perceptions are filtered by your
personal biases — experiences, beliefs, prior knowledge, and even your mood at
the moment. Your biases affect your perceptions and experiences when they're
being encoded in your brain. And when you retrieve a memory, your mood and
other biases at that moment can influence what information you actually recall.
3.
Blocking: Someone asks you a question and the answer is right on the tip of
your tongue. You know that you know it, but you just can't think of it. This is
perhaps the most familiar example of blocking the temporary inability to
retrieve a memory. In many cases, the barrier is a memory similar to the one
you're looking for, and you retrieve the wrong one.
This competing memory
is so intrusive that you can't think of the memory you want. Scientists think
that memory blocks become more common with age and that they account for the
trouble older people have remembering other people's names. Research shows that
people are able to retrieve about half of the blocked memories within just a
minute.
4.
Misattribution: Misattribution occurs when you remember something accurately in
part, but misattribute some detail, like the time, place, or person involved.
Another kind of misattribution occurs when you believe a thought you had was
totally original when, in fact, it came from something you had previously read
or heard but had forgotten about. This sort of misattribution explains cases of
unintentional plagiarism, in which a writer passes off some information as
original when he or she actually read it somewhere before.
As with several other
kinds of memory lapses, misattribution becomes more common with age. As you
age, you absorb fewer details when acquiring information because you have
somewhat more trouble concentrating and processing information rapidly. As you
grow older, your memories grow older as well. And old memories are especially
prone to misattribution.
Persistence: Most people worry
about forgetting things. But in some cases people are tormented by memories
they wish they could forget, but can't. The persistence of memories of
traumatic events, negative feelings, and ongoing fears is another form of
memory problem. Some of these memories accurately reflect horrifying events
while others may be negative distortions of reality.
People suffering from
depression are particularly
prone to having persistent, disturbing memories. So are people with
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). PTSD can result from many different
forms of traumatic exposure like sexual abuse or wartime experiences.
Flashbacks, which are persistent, intrusive memories of the traumatic event,
are a core feature of PTSD.
Suggestibility: Suggestibility is
the vulnerability of your memory to the power of suggestion, information that
you learn about an occurrence after the fact becomes incorporated into your
memory of the incident even though you did not experience these details.
Although little is known about exactly how suggestibility works in the brain,
the suggestion fools your mind into thinking it's a real memory.
5.
Transience: This is the tendency to forget facts or events over time. You are
most likely to forget information soon after you learn it. However, memory has
a use-it-or-lose-it quality: memories that are called up and used frequently
are least likely to be forgotten. Although transience might seem like a sign of
memory weakness, brain scientists regard it as beneficial because it clears the
brain of unused memories, making way for newer, more useful ones.
“Let the past be content with itself for man needs forgetfulness as
well as memory.” (James Stephens)[i]
[i] Sources used:
·
“Forgetfulness — 7 types of normal memory
problems” by Harvard Medical School
·
“Why You
Forget: 5 Strange Facts about Memory” by Bahar Gholipour
I struggle with forgetfulness.
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