Beyond a disc

blacbird said:

I dunno. I work with a guy who, I swear, goes home every night and just plain empties his brain in the trash compactor. He can't remember the simplest thing from one day to the next. What you tell him one day, you need to tell him the next, and the one after that, and . . . I can't count the number of times I've showed him how to download and save an attachment in his e-mail. I've known him for more than 20 years, and he's always been this way.

Fortunately, he retired (at age 58) last month.

caw

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Yeah, i've worked with people like that.

I wonder if he's had many head injuries over the course of his life, or done a lot of drugs.

Smiling Ted said:

The nature of biological memory is still very much up in the air.

There's a lot of research now that suggests that much of our memory isn't recalled, but rather "dynamically recreated" - according to what we believe happened.

It would be comforting to think that nothing is ever lost...

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The brain is not so easy to understand, is it? Personally (and i am no scientist, so the following is very much my own opinion based on research and limited understanding), i think it's both. I don't think anything is ever lost, but i do think the way we recall it is very dynamic. Surely at least the kernel of the memory has to be there for us to be able to dynamically recreate it. But how we remember becomes very interesting, and there's a whole lot of factors that influence that, i think (life experience since that point is one huge factor, i reckon--as in, more knowledge of the person involved/the type of situation/other stuff).

Also, i don't think we ever store memories impartially or clinically either. Two people can observe the same situation and, based on mood, personal experience, other intangibles, recount it and later recall it two completely different ways.

Stress can be a big thing. A conversation that we might not think anything of normally might be seen to be an attack, or somehow else tinged with heavy emotion, if we've been under severe stress (speaking from personal experience).

Some time back i remember reading a study that included a situation where a bank was 'held' up by someone wielding a banana, and then afterwards the people in the bank, who had no prior knowledge of what was about to happen, were asked to recall the situation. The great majority of them, including the security guard (who fortunately wasn't armed himself), took the banana for a gun. And while the 'robber' didn't wear a mask or otherwise disguise his facial features, the descriptions of him varied wildly and many were nowhere near the mark.

Chemical imbalances in the brain are another thing that contributes to how we interpret, thus store, situations. A person suffering from major depression is likely to see, and thus recall, a situation far differently from someone who is not, as well as reason on a situation far differently.

Ah, the brain. So much fun to talk about