My Memory Theory

Have you ever stood at the ATM machine for 2 minutes trying to remember you PIN or had to think about what your phone number is then sang the words to the entire McDonald's menu song on the way back to your car? We have all had that experience or something like it. It is the subject of numerous musings and comedy bits, Dave Barry's probably being the best.

It's commonly known that you only have a certain amount of your brain to utilize--the rest being needed for storing penguins (RIP Douglas Adams, you were a genius), and therefore have only a certain amount to use for storage. Now you take in a lot of information in the course of a lifetime, everything from how to use chopsticks, to who the winner of the last Survivor thing was. It is only natural then that you will run out of storage space rather quickly. Some people I know refer to this as "hard drive being full." This is an apt metaphor.

When the brain fills up though, it doesn't disallow incoming information. Maybe at one point in the evolution of our species, that was the case. But those that were stunted from learning anything new were bound to miss something important for survival and all die sometime, paving the way for those that still were able to learn.

So then after that there were two types of people left: people who could choose what to remember and those that couldn't. Now you'd think that the people who could choose what to remember would have a better chance of survival since they would be able to remember everything that would help them to survive right? Turns out you'd be wrong. You see there was still so much information that when we stopped to sort it all and figure out what to remember and what to discard etc., a lion ate you. You see the packrats went first since they had the hardest time deciding. So eventually the ones that survived were the ones whose brains sorted this out for them. Over time the brain has completely taken over this function.

Of course evolution isn't perfect, and so the brain uses a sort of pseudo-random approach. When you are full and you get some new information the brain just kicks out some random bit of information. So you really have no control over what you remember and what you don't. The brain has limited capability to predict what will be important and what won't be important later, since in the early days it was so hard to know what would be crucial for survival later. A random approach worked as well as any, and persists to this day.

So this has a few implications. The most important being of course that it is not your fault that you forgot your anniversary, or to do your reports for work, or your daughter's middle name, or the name of the Lakers' backup point guard. It is the fault of course of the damn lions and other predators that were trying to eat us in the earliest days of humanity.