I always assumed it was a frame-of-reference deal, at least in part.
Once, out of the blue, I triggered a really old memory, and it was so weird once it had gone, because -- I was looking up at the door! I couldn't reach the doorknob! I didn't really know where I was!
It all felt perfectly normal during the moment of remembering, but once I'd shaken it off? It felt so weird. I pieced together when/where it must have been by what I could remember of the remembering (my height --> my likely approximate age --> where I would have been at that age; + cross-reference to likely settings there) but it was almost like looking at a film: an examination of something after the fact, instead of being able to call up the memory and run through it as with a 'normal' memory.
That (and another incident, resulting in the fact that my brain tries to tell me that I remember being on the plane from X to Y, when I'm really remembering that I saw a photograph of me on the plane from X to Y) gave me the inkling that perhaps we lose old memories because -- to use a computer analogy -- they're in a different format. So much of our experience is viscerally encoded; we don't have to think about how tall we are in relation to, say, reaching out to open a door, or compared to a crowd of people around us, so memories which contradict our experience are going to be "unplayable" most of the time because we're no longer in tune with it.
Do other people find memories triggered by small physical things, like touching an object or seeing something from a specific vantage point? I'm really curious whether this is a "me" thing, or a more general thing, because it seems like an interesting way that memories could be shuffled out.
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dancing_serpent
(no subject)
Date: 2014-07-14 01:19 am (UTC)I always assumed it was a frame-of-reference deal, at least in part.
Once, out of the blue, I triggered a really old memory, and it was so weird once it had gone, because -- I was looking up at the door! I couldn't reach the doorknob! I didn't really know where I was!
It all felt perfectly normal during the moment of remembering, but once I'd shaken it off? It felt so weird. I pieced together when/where it must have been by what I could remember of the remembering (my height --> my likely approximate age --> where I would have been at that age; + cross-reference to likely settings there) but it was almost like looking at a film: an examination of something after the fact, instead of being able to call up the memory and run through it as with a 'normal' memory.
That (and another incident, resulting in the fact that my brain tries to tell me that I remember being on the plane from X to Y, when I'm really remembering that I saw a photograph of me on the plane from X to Y) gave me the inkling that perhaps we lose old memories because -- to use a computer analogy -- they're in a different format. So much of our experience is viscerally encoded; we don't have to think about how tall we are in relation to, say, reaching out to open a door, or compared to a crowd of people around us, so memories which contradict our experience are going to be "unplayable" most of the time because we're no longer in tune with it.
Do other people find memories triggered by small physical things, like touching an object or seeing something from a specific vantage point? I'm really curious whether this is a "me" thing, or a more general thing, because it seems like an interesting way that memories could be shuffled out.