Do you think it's true that the brain remembers absolutely everything that happens to you?

Question

i read that the human brain stores absolutely every experience, its just that they get shut away into the subconscious and you can tap into them again and potentially recall everything

Answer 1

I believe it is true. I am going through PTSD at the moment. I have started having flashbacks and recalling other traumas in my life, which I had blocked out for 26yrs and had not remembered until now. This condition has thrown up a lot of issues and memories in my brain that I had forgotten about. Unfortunately for me all the ones that are coming up are frightening and traumatic. Lets hope there are some better ones once I have recovered from PTSD.

:-)))

Answer 2

if that theory is true, there must be a way to find out what you had for dinner on Sunday, April 8th, 1988.
in fact, you probably need a calendar's help to find out if that day was a Sunday at all.

memory is still mysterious in science, but the memory-prediction framework (check wikipedia.org) is something that shows WHY the brain memorizes anything at all: remembering that fire is hot is essential for survival - what you had for dinner two weeks ago, is not of any importance, unless someone called you in the restaurant to tell you that your house is on fire. in that case, you will remember eating in a restaurant on that disastrous night for years to come.

regarding the subconscious: most experiences of each moment are PROCESSED subconsciously, because your consciousness only has very limited processing power compared to the subconscious. but that doesn't mean that everything is also STORED or memorized.
an experiment with amnesia patients showed the following: a doctor shook a patient's (X) hand when greeting X. he had a needle in his hand though, that hurt X. five minutes later the doctor came back again, and X said hello as if it was the first time today (although it might have been the 20th...amnesia), BUT X did not want to shake the doctors hand - and X had no idea why.
yes, the subconscious does store information and this helps amnesia patients to learn anything (well, depending on what kind of amnesia...), but it is irrational to say that "absolutely everything" is stored, especially if that means "stored in long-term memory".

Answer 3

I would say yes, and that the problem with conscious memory is either overriding this knowledge, confusing different events or memories together, emotional blocks or separations that prevent us from accessing information or intuition, or just plain recall issues (not having adequate associations or cues to trigger the information consciously).

When I took a psychology class on learning, cognition and perception, the professor made a note of a study where people who had amnesia were asked to learn the same tasks over again. Even if they had no conscious memory of having learned the material or tasks, the learning time decreased with repeated sessions; therefore, the conclusion was that the mind was still storing and learning from the past experiences and associations even if the conscious mind was not aware of that.

There is also more serious scientific and medical research on "past-life" regressions used in therapy these days. Look online for Dr. Weiss and his documentation of case studies. Even if this is just spiritual phenomena of tapping into past memories of "soul-mates" and not direct reincarnation, the research and studies into this field reveal a lot of valuable information about how the human mind and psychology responds and processes unconscious influences and emotions. So I think a lot can be learned indirectly from this same research.

I believe you could potentially hypnotize people to recall anything in their past or within their range of perceptions, but the difficulty is in verifying the source, whether these perceptions are imagined or real, or memories which belong to other people and not that person, or how much they are distorted, etc. Even if they are not real, I believe that like dreams they can be interpreted to get messages or ideas that can be used for good to identify and solve problems, regardless of the source.

Answer 4

Maybe if you search the internet for LONG and SHORT TERM MEMORY you will understand the process better.
WIll have to remind my self on that to.
Simply put, the information once processed into the short term memory and passed to the long term memory is permanent...
There was a documentary recently on BBC HOW TO IMPROVE YOUR MEMORY and you could see lots of tips and methods like involving visualization, building this mental picture to keep the information permanent. And yes, the subconscious mind has infinite storage, but it's synchronized with your feelings. You will recover the information when you feel like you need it :)

Answer 5

Well in Psychology I learnt that it stores every sensory experience but it isn't permanent, so you must attend to it, and rehearsal of it makes it more memorable, but in some cases that could be true.

Every person is different after all.

Answer 6

of course, it's just that so much stuff gets stored through the years that it's hard for us to keep up with it all...but have you ever just forgot all about something and one day out of the blue, you smell a scent, or hear a song, or a voice, and that memory comes flooding back. it was always there, we just need to be reminded of it sometimes. then there are other memories that just stand out in our minds so dominantly that they are always at the tip of our thoughts.

Answer 7

i absolutely agree, it seems the smallest thing, a smell, a word, a picture, causes a person to recall a memory long "forgotten" from the deep recesses of the mind

Answer 8

Yes, I think that everything you learn is in their somewhere. I went to a Montessori school and was taught a variety of subjects and even though I forgot them when I went to public school, things that I had learned previously "clicked" .

Answer 9

Deffinatly.
Ever get that thing where you see someone / something happen and you remember back years to an experience that happened to you ?
That is fascinating !

Answer 10

The brain is the best hard drive a computer can have.