Surely if I ask you about that special date that you lived years ago, you remember all the details that accompanied it: how you were dressed, special smells, even flavors. However, if I ask you, what did you have for dinner yesterday? It costs you a little more to remember, even your speech will be much more concise and limited in details.
This happens because our memory does not store information haphazardly, but is creative and adapts. That is why I try so hard for you to focus on the positive side of life because the way memory works makes the human being optimistic by nature.
The term Hypermnesia explains a memory disorder in which the person who suffers from it has an outstanding degree of retention and recall. It is what is commonly known as unlimited memory.
The term comes from the Greek terminology and is formed by the words "hiper" (excess) and "mnesia" (memory). Based on this double meaning, the term refers to a excess of memory.
The memory capacity of people suffering from Hypermnesia is closely related to the autobiographical memory. This type of memory refers to the ability to evoke our own experiences and memories of our life.
A person with Hypermnesia can remember without any effort what kind of clothes they have worn each day of their life. You can even remember what the weather was like on a specific day too.
Gazzaniga (a psychologist at the University of California) defines two characteristics for any experience to be stored in our memory: we remember those events that excite us and also those that surprise us, so that what has moved us and has been unexpected will be present when we try to evoke our past.
If you look back to make a list of the things that we remember the most and best in our lives, they will probably all be related to experiences that have moved us emotionally. We remember special moments both positive and painful.
On the other hand, I'm sure if I asked you, Where were you the day the Twin Towers of New York fell? it won't be hard to remember.
It is true that they did not have a personal impact on the lives of the majority but it was so surprising and left us so affected on a psychological level that left a mark on our memory.
The intensity of what we live is, therefore, what lasts over time. The more intense our experience, the more likely it is that we can recall it later..
This fact explains why with the passage of a lifetime, the elderly, even those who suffer from some type of dementia, relate in great detail memories of their childhood and adolescence, years in which everything was experienced for the first time and therefore lived. very intensely.
Schacter, a psychologist at Harvard University, discovered that, every time we remember, we modify our memory, that is, we create variations of the initial memory.
It seems that our brain is "programmed" to remember only the main facts and that, on the other hand, the details do not remember them so well, so we make it up unconsciously every time we remember.
I will tell you some derived findings:
It is true that there are recurring memories that we cannot forget and that we are able to explain in great detail, such as those of unpleasant events, in reality our brain does forget many of these experiences, what happens is that allows us to preserve the memory of those experiences that have allowed us to learn something and have been useful to us.
This way of remembering important data very well and being "lazier" for details has an adaptive purpose: that of storing only the essentials of a lived experience, thus saving energy and avoiding cluttering the memory with trivial details. These are precisely the details that we unconsciously make up when we remember.
This ability to add details also has a practical function, since it exercises us to imagine the future. And thanks to this ability we can also be optimistic.
Schacter says that most of us are optimistic, since when asked about our life expectancies, We tend to think that more positive than negative events are going to happen to us.
Most of us tend to think in relation to our lives the maxim that "the good is yet to come". In fact, there is research at a biological level that has shown that there are mechanisms that encourage us to think in this way..
Perhaps the most prominent studies are the Tali Sharot:
One of his studies was based on measuring the brain activity of adolescents, in order to determine to what extent they were optimistic and what areas of the mind were involved in this quality.
The adolescents were asked to imagine that good things and bad things would happen to them in the future. Subsequently, they had to indicate the pleasure of emotion with which they lived these hypothetical situations.
He concluded that most of the boys believed that positive events they were much closer in time than the negatives, that were visualized as less important and blurred, located in the distant future and not very relevant.
In addition, the students were convinced that the positive events that were to come were much more important than those they had already experienced and remembered pleasantly, the future was better for them than the past.
When the adolescents in the study thought about negative experiences, the areas of the brain responsible for regulating emotions were inhibited, that is, the mind was busy eliminating such pessimistic thoughts.
Conversely, When those same young people imagined positive events, those same brain areas were coordinated and activated to generate pleasant emotions.
Ultimately, these studies provide us with data to conclude that our memory induces us to be optimistic.
So we should be grateful to our optimistic brain for being able to imagine promising futures for us, but also for remembering better what has been good in our past, leaving aside the bad experiences that, surely, we have all lived.
From an evolutionary point of view, I believe that without this inventive, creative and optimistic brain, we would most likely not have reached where we have arrived as a species.
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