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Do you think the brain ever truly forgets anything?


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I always thought the brain never truly ''erases'' anything even if it's not useful. Then again, I had doubts because apparently, my brain isn't able to remember useful information when I need it the most. I created this thread because I've just visited a town I SWEAR I've seen in dreams before, everything was just like in my dream. As much as I would like to think my soul/consciousness left my body and visited this town through dreams, I thought that had to have a logical explanation, so I asked my parents whether we've been in that town before and yes, we did when I was 7.

 

It's not the first time this happens, last year I dreamt about being in a zoo and one day I went to that same zoo and everything was just like in the dream, I've never been to that zoo since I was like 6-7. Not only that, but also the fact that memories can be triggered by anything, smells, experiences, someone else's stories, whatever, meaning that the memory is still there even if you can't access it, where else is the brain gonna pull the memory from? What do you think?

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There are a few people who have odd memory conditions that allow them to remember more than the average person (eidetic memory, savant syndrome, hyperthymesia, etc.) I don't think it's too far fetched to say at least one cause could be a switch that allows for someone to remember more than they should to be turned on via genetics or brain chemistry.

 

A psychologist told Cat that the human mind actually stores all of your memories. I can't say how credible that is, since in science nowadays needing to drink 8 bottles of water is a myth and the marshmallow experiment was misleading.

 

I'm deeply suspicious that it's possible to remember absolutely everything since mistakes in the human body happen and little bits of information can be lost, but I am warm to the idea the mind can store lots of information hat we don't actively remember/think about.

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I didn't know about any of those memory conditions, but that sounds really interesting. Neither I do think the brain remember every single detail, just the general experience e.g, being in the school, going to the grocery store, etc...Though it would be amazing if you could remember everything.

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The brain has finite storage, so it is impossible to remember everything, however the maximum capacity for the brain is rediculusly high, and it also has a clever trick where it remembers sort of how something happened, rather than how it actually happened, which takes up less space than it would otherwise.

So it is probably possible to remember a lot more than we normally do, but not everything

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I don't think it is really relevant the brain's storage capacity, chances are we won't reach that limit in our entire individual existence.

 

 

it also has a clever trick where it remembers sort of how something happened, rather than how it actually happened, which takes up less space than it would otherwise.

 

You mean like the brain filling in the gaps, creating false memories?

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I mean the brain picking and choosing what is worth storing. For example you probably remember whether or not you had a toothbrush 5 years ago, but you probably don't remember the color of it

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That's what I was saying, the brain picks up the general idea but not all the details. And there I was, thinking about searching in a lucid dream for the lost conversations I had on Messenger with my friends lol, still worth a try

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The memory thing is tricky, and the authorities on the subject still debate the extent of our memory, even with evidence that it is much more complex and complicated than we acknowledge. Roger Penrose did studies on exposed brains during surgeries, and clearly demonstrated that applying an electrode to an area of the brain not only allowed subjected to remember a past event, but they remembered it in greater detail, and it was as if they were reliving the experience in real time. Not just re-experiencing it, they reported being there. More than one study has demonstrated this. Professor, PhD, MD Stan Grof offers a therapy called holotropic breathwork, and the practitioners believe people have memories that go all the way back to pre-birth. There are people who report memories that go back to birth, though these folks are extremely rare, there are documented cases. It is known that babies exposed to particular voices or music on a regular basis in the womb respond to those voices and music after birth. We are learning from conception day one. For example, mothers who watched a particular soap opera every day, babies suckled more and faster, as measured by scientist, when they heard the theme song.

 

The younger a person is, the fewer the filters that block information. Children exposed to multiple languages at birth and continue to be exposed to multiple languages will speak more languages. Yes, some people are just naturally good at language acquisition and didn't need prior exposure. As your personality grows, so do limitations. If you have a bad math interaction, you may find that a preference to avoid math becomes a block to doing math. There is no physiological reason for differences in math abilities. Every one can learn, and with practice, people improve. We have all kinds of beliefs that limit learning. We also have different learning styles. kinesthetic learners take in and hold information differently than an auditory learner. Most people are visual learners. People can have multiple learning styles.

 

There is solid evidence that memory is record holographically in the brain. One doesn't just store memory in one place. The information for apple is the word, the color, the taste, the smell, the size... it's bits and pieces everywhere in the brain, spread out. That's why if you do get a small brain injury, you don't necessarily loose everything. Do some people, yeah. But then, there are also people that have no apparent brain injuries that get total amnesia. Go figure. You see an apple, and multiple areas light up to identify it. In addition to that, you have a fake apple in your head, a short cut representation to get at that information quicker, so you can identify and sort more efficiently. Your brain makes short cuts. It uses models, metaphors, abstracts, and narrows things down to the simplest equations, because quite frankly, you don't need all the information in reality to make a decision. Your senses take in all the information, your brain has access to all of that, it records all of that, but your personality filters most of it; consider the metaphor of hard drive information and virtual memory. We work in upper virtual memory, subconscious is lower virtual memory that is also accessing recorded information. We take in everything, but what arrives at our conscious operating system is a mere fraction of that information. And this is good. People with perfect memory function less well. You ask them where they were on a date and a time, they remember where they were, what they were wearing, what they were feeling emotionally physically, the temperature, etc, all the sounds and sights and taste, juxtaposed to present feelings and ideas and it overwhelms them. Idiot savants can recall huge chunks of useless data, but they are generally not functional in practical, daily things.

 

Most people remember just enough, and there is solid evidence we don't even remember what we think we remember. Every time you take a memory off the shelf to examine it, you add something, and your remove something. Witnesses at a scene of an accident will report a variety of things, and they're mostly unreliable, except for the certainty, there was an accident. Hypnosis works, and you can recover memories, but it is unreliable, not admissible in court, because sometime people create things on the fly, due to influence or due to a poorly trained hypnotist. Under hypnosis, you can be encouraged to create a fiction. So, if I hypnotize you, and I am trained in this, and get you under and I ask "were you abducted by aliens," your brain will give me exactly what I want to hear. And it can be convincing cause your brain will draw on every movie literature media reference and it will construct something believable. That's in your head, even if you don't really pay attention to ufo stories and hate scifi and never ever watch or read fiction. It's that prevalent in our social lives.

 

More than one person who has had a traumatic event have reported seeing their life flash before their eyes. They're not reporting a summary, they report a full life, in an instant, and they have surprising recall of things they had forgotten, and suddenly reclaimed, they found the information verifiable.

 

It is definitely possible for you to have been somewhere as a child, not actively remember that, and re-encounter it with actual memories, and or intuitive feelings of knowing about a place that is not just de-ja-vu. You could also just have de-ja-vu experience. There are people who had really poor memories who have strokes or accident, and suddenly they remember everything. These people are rare, but they exist. Of course, there are also some people who had strokes and suddenly manifested the ability to play an instrument and or do art where no previous ability ever existed. The brain is complex. We don't know everything. And the thing that is bothering most scientist today is they have not been able to pin down consciousness to an absolute biological function, other than, they're pretty sure most of it is limited to the brain. (There is evidence we think without stomach, our hearts... Memory transplants with hearts, there is evidence for that. People report memories they never had, but other families say, yeah, that was our son... (Doctor Pearsall's book, the heart's code, suggests it's not just heart donations, but all tissue donation, even blood transfusions.) They are determined to do that, but they're just not there yet. There is lots of solid evidence that sometimes people remember things that they could not have possibly known. These things defy logic. Maybe that's why we have people like Carl Jung pushing ideas like the collective unconscious.

 

Another good book that relates and supports these concepts is "The Man Who Tasted Shapes," a book on synesthesia. It references Penrose, it references the holographic nature of the brain... And, this is interesting to me, he is not the only medical doctor who clearly asserts in his book this idea that we assume that we take information in from outside, process it through the brain, and it comes to consciousness, but it may very well be the other way around, IE consciousness takes the information, puts in the brain, and projects out into the world.

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The memory thing is tricky, and the authorities on the subject still debate the extent of our memory, even with evidence that it is much more complex and complicated than we acknowledge. Roger Penrose did studies on exposed brains during surgeries, and clearly demonstrated that applying an electrode to an area of the brain not only allowed subjected to remember a past event, but they remembered it in greater detail, and it was as if they were reliving the experience in real time. Not just re-experiencing it, they reported being there. More than one study has demonstrated this. Professor, PhD, MD Stan Grof offers a therapy called holotropic breathwork, and the practitioners believe people have memories that go all the way back to pre-birth. There are people who report memories that go back to birth, though these folks are extremely rare, there are documented cases. It is known that babies exposed to particular voices or music on a regular basis in the womb respond to those voices and music after birth. We are learning from conception day one. For example, mothers who watched a particular soap opera every day, babies suckled more and faster, as measured by scientist, when they heard the theme song.

 

 

Isn't that the man who did research about consciousness after death or something? I thought you were talking about memories from past lives or something, but that thing about memories from when you were inside the worm is pretty interesting. Any link to those experiments?

 

There is solid evidence that memory is record holographically in the brain. One doesn't just store memory in one place. The information for apple is the word, the color, the taste, the smell, the size... it's bits and pieces everywhere in the brain, spread out.

 

 

 

I thought memories were stored as experiences, that's it, the full thing, not bits of it, but that makes way more sense. Wouldn't that mean when we remember memories, the brain just picks up the data it needs to construct the memory from different parts of the brain?

 

Under hypnosis, you can be encouraged to create a fiction. So, if I hypnotize you, and I am trained in this, and get you under and I ask "were you abducted by aliens," your brain will give me exactly what I want to hear. And it can be convincing cause your brain will draw on every movie literature media reference and it will construct something believable. That's in your head, even if you don't really pay attention to ufo stories and hate scifi and never ever watch or read fiction. It's that prevalent in our social lives.

 

 

Why does that happen? if the brain knows there weren't any alien abduction, why would it make up a fictional story? why does it need to say what you want to hear?

 

More than one person who has had a traumatic event have reported seeing their life flash before their eyes. They're not reporting a summary, they report a full life, in an instant, and they have surprising recall of things they had forgotten, and suddenly reclaimed, they found the information verifiable.

 

 

 

Does their life truly flash through their eyes, or just the general idea, like a summary? I know you said they don't report a summary but I'm having a hard time believing their perception of time dilated long enough to let them experience a lifetime in a matter of minutes.

 

The brain is complex. We don't know everything. And the thing that is bothering most scientist today is they have not been able to pin down consciousness to an absolute biological function, other than, they're pretty sure most of it is limited to the brain. (There is evidence we think without stomach, our hearts... Memory transplants with hearts, there is evidence for that. People report memories they never had, but other families say, yeah, that was our son... (Doctor Pearsall's book, the heart's code, suggests it's not just heart donations, but all tissue donation, even blood transfusions.) They are determined to do that, but they're just not there yet. There is lots of solid evidence that sometimes people remember things that they could not have possibly known. These things defy logic. Maybe that's why we have people like Carl Jung pushing ideas like the collective unconscious.

 

 

How can they know those memories are real? unless they suddenly gained access to knowledge they never had before, how can you say they're real? they could have been made up by the brain. This is getting near methaphysical territory but it's really interesting and unsettling, back when I was really interested in consciousness existing outside the body, I would read lot of articles about experiments, research and crazy theories about it, and Carl Jung was a name that would be thrown in there very often, got any interesting credible article to read?

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I think the brain operates on a level similar to a hard-drive, where, even if something is "deleted," when really it's just set to be copied over, the connecting neurons making a new pathway around and through old memories. They'll sit there in that "forgotten" space, and occasionally a passing signal will fire by it and light it up just enough to be visible, which in turn might cast a spotlight on the rest of the memory. It's kinda like fragmented data in drive recovery works, giving a bit of credence to how sleeping is like "defragging" your mind. Every face you see in your dreams, after all, is a face pulled from some memory or another, stranger or otherwise.

 

Memories can be overwritten and changed as well. There was that experiment they did with a bunch of families that went to Disney World, where they brought out photoshopped pictures of them with Bugs Bunny. Most of them remembered meeting Bugs Bunny fondly, despite the fact that Bugs Bunny isn't a Disney character and was never at the park to begin with.

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