Do you
think that the human brain actually stores all occurrences in time? In other
words, do you think that we have storage for every picture we see throughout
our entire life and that perhaps we just lose direct access to it from
interference or that we truly forget?
Our brains remember
very little (comparing with the volume of incoming information).
Memory constantly forgets
useless information.
Moreover, our brains remember practically no pictures. Our brains do remember
concepts which related with parts of pictures.
That's why if you saw lots of cars in the past, then it’s easier for you to
remember couple of cars on the picture.
If you never saw cars in the past – you would have hard time remembering and
recalling details of cars on the picture.
We forget
information with time.
At the same time information is stored in the brain in redundant form, so if
one concept is lost then other concept could help to recall required knowledge.
However if all related concepts cleaned up, then the knowledge will be lost.
In the other hand, intelligent system can learn lost
information again :-)
Sometimes it
is hard to activate concept even when concept still exists in memory, because most of concept’s
relations were lost.
For instance, you may forget to take your documents with you when you go out of
home, because this concept ("Take the documents") is not active at
the moment.
Later, because you need to use your documents (to get a loan, for example) you
would remember that you had to take the documents.
The reason of forgetting here is a "lack of
references to the concept".
The cause of the "lack of references" could be "forgetting
process applied to references" or "not all required references to the
concept are created".
Bottom line:
1) We definitely don't remember everything. We remember something. Actually we
remember only the most important part of information.
2) We constantly forget information.
3) There are two type of forgetting: "concept
forgetting" and "relations forgetting".
4) Even if information is completely forgotten, strong can learn the same information again.
Original
version of Do we remember everything?