The brain is an amazing part of the body. It does so many things that fascinate me. One of these things is what I want to write about today. The way that the brain stores memories is something that I don't know much about. I think there's special sections for long-term and short-term memories, which, when affected, leads to things like Dementia. I think that's about all I know.
But I don't really want to write about the biology of memories, but rather how they come back to you. There's so much that we put into our brains on a day to day basis, that it's crazy to think that anything actually sticks. All the information about what we're seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching all goes into our brains and is processed. You won't remember everything that you do/say, but chances are you'll remember a great deal of it. Yet that's only short-term stuff. What about the long-term things? How is it that we can remember exactly how we felt at our Nanna's funeral, or just what we said on that holiday we took with high school friends to Queenscliff? I don't have a good memory at the best of times, yet these feelings, words and images come streaming back when triggered.
Many different things trigger those memories, including sounds, smells, words, photos or thinking about a person/place. I'm sure there's more things. It makes me think of a great big filing system in your brain that's constantly being looked through as the day goes by. Your brain cross checking each thing that happens to see if it's like something that's happened before.
There's two other things regarding memory that I briefly want to mention. The first is the differences between people's memories. I don't mean the different abilities to remember things, but rather that different people can remember different things about the same situation. For example a picnic. One person remembers the fight with the wasp that happened which ended up with them catching the wasp in their cup. The other person remembers the food that was there and the reason for the picnic. (In this senario I'm assuming the picnic was sometime in the past). I guess this has to do with people's personalities and the things that they find important in the first place.
The second thing I wanted to mention is something that always amazes me. With the vast amount of music/songs that have been recorded and produced over the years, people have a pretty good ability to recall song lyrics. Start up a song you haven't heard for years and soon you're crooning along with the right words. Somewhere in your brains there must be a separate section just for song lyrics...
