Most of us define “memory” as something from the past that we can recall here in the present.
We know some of our memories are clearer than others but, overall, we trust our memories. We have to. They guide every second of our lives and have since the day we were born.
This “certainty” of our memories is why it is so upsetting when we can’t remember something, or when our memories turn out to be inaccurate. After all, if our memories can’t be trusted, how do we know what’s real?
But this faith in our memories, while understandable, isn’t deserved. Our memories aren’t designed to be perfect. Instead, they’re designed to remember what’s useful and forget what’s not.
To quote Charan Ranganath, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California at Davis, “the human brain is not a memorization machine. It’s a thinking machine.”1 So, which information is stored, and how it is stored, is based on what will help us quickly make better decisions as we navigate the world.
Remembering what’s important.
Forgetting what’s not.
Remembering every detail from every second of our lives would be extraordinarily inefficient, taking up a massive amount of our brain’s capacity and forcing us to replay millions of unnecessary details before taking any action — a delay that could impact our success, if not our survival.
So, instead of literal recall, our brains have learned to streamline memory to record just the key elements that need to be quickly recalled down the road.
If you’d like to know more about how your memory works, click here.