Memory Retention And Dreams

Discussion in 'Science and Nature' started by Oni~, May 12, 2015.

  1. I just woke from a half-lucid dreamathon where I had 5-7 separate stories play out.  (Always been a very vivid and copious dreamer).      One of them featured a substitute teacher I had for one day,  20 years ago and haven't thought about since, at least not that I recall.   

    She was nothing special, good or bad.  Nothing special happened that day to make her stick in my memory,  yet in the dream I recalled her clothing, her voice, her general attitude.  It felt like a major step back through time and getting to relive a moment of childhood.

    Now I am seriously wondering, what other memories are stored up there that I'm not aware of.   I certainly never thought of this woman in 20 years and now I recall her so vividly with a dream?   Could this be done with other childhood events?
     
    I know hypnosis has been used to encourage memory recall.   Does this mean we store everything that happens to us, just can't recall most of it?
     
  2. Nope. We don't store everything. We store a lot of stuff that we can't regularly recall though. Our brain separates stuff into long term and short term storage, and it only saves things that we commit to long term. This is why if you have a bad short term memory, there are tricks you can use to remember stuff. What is actually happening with these tricks is that you are forcing your brain to commit the memory to long term storage. 
     
  3. I do think we store everything, but our brains have coping mechanisms to deal with the information. I was reading about anonimide(don't know about the spelling) and how its the chemical in our brain that's responsible for forgetting. The article went on to say that if we didn't have this chemical to help us forget, we would basically overload on information. I came across this info while reading about the cb2(?) receptor that's responsible for absorbing cannabinoids, and it turns out that the receptors that people have been saying is only responsible for THC absorbtion is actually made for anonimide. I'm usually pretty high while I read that kind of stuff, so I'm sure my understanding of it is a lil off, but that's the general idea of it .
     
  4. Interesting to read this thread because it reminded me of a dream I had a year or two ago.

    In my dream I was at a restaurant or something. They had music playing in the background over a speaker. Every note was spot on, the vocals perfect, the beat of the drums. It was all exactly as it should be. I have no idea how I remembered this song in my dream in full detail. I was so awestruck by this I actually looked up at the speaker in my dream and listened. It was absolutely amazing. This wasnt a dream I had control over, it was simply a random dream.

    I woke up with this wtf feeling. I wish I had those powers in everyday life.
     
  5. hypnosis will likely lead false memories, because the person doing hypnosis may unknowingly be suggestive , making you generate events that never occurred in the first place. It's a very interesting phenomena on why we are unable to recall a large portion of the dream,, unless you immediately write it down. Probably due to the state dependent memory phenomena, where certain events are easier to be recalled if the time of recall is similar to the time of encoding it. For instance, if you study material while high you will remember more of that material if you were high compared to being sober.  While the dream may appear vivid ,with tons of detail, the accuracy may be questionable also, since most of it is generated to fill in the gaps. We likely store, snapshots of memories then when recalling it we fill in the gaps through implicit deduction. Otherwise, it would be an extremely laborious process to encode so much information. A good way to recall childhood events is to look for cues that existed during your childhood like the kinds of music or TV shows and video games, also picture albums and diaries.
     

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