Memories.
Love em or hate them, we all have em. The good, the bad, the boring and sometimes the just plain weird and pointless.
But as advanced as our modern minds are, we all invariably forget something. Important memories, minor memories, stupid memories, all of them! They are all prone to being forgotten over time, to be overwritten by another memory or sometimes, just plain forgotten.
How about those memories that we want to forget?
I’m sure that sentence alone triggered your own memories. Somewhere inside of your head, there is a memory that you would much rather do without, because it’s too annoying, too painful or just too ugly to look at.
But think again. If you read that sentence and noted that you have something that you just want to forget, have you really forgotten it?
Maybe you haven’t.
Or have you? Did you just happen to remember that you once had such a terrible memory that you wanted to forget it, but you can’t remember what that actual memory was?
What about if I suggested that maybe, just maybe, you never really forget anything?
Even when you want to.
Perhaps when you forget something, whether it’s over time or because you force yourself to, what your mind actually does is break that memory down. Cut it into little pieces, fragments, and simultaneously breaking up the bonds between the different fragments of memory.
Let’s try an example.
Say that, on one particular night, you met up with a person at a place. The music and atmosphere of that place was very distinctive, and the day was of particular significance to you for whatever reason. And you shared a very special, memorable moment with that person.
Now, for whatever reason down the track, you decided that you wanted to get rid of that memory.
A significant amount of time later, you enter a place. The music and atmosphere of this particular place is extremely similar to that where you shared that memorable moment with someone long, long ago.
Would you remember it all?
Or is it more likely to be a feeling? A sense of familiarity, a sense that you know of this from somewhere, but for some reason you can’t remember how, when, where, who and why. You might remember that you were here on some special day, but you can't remember when. You might remember that you were with someone, but you can't remember who. You might remember that you did something special, but you can't remember what.
All you can remember is a fragment of the original memory, specifically the bit that was triggered by whatever had just occurred to remind you of it. But that’s all it is. A fragment of a memory, with hints that it was once related, linked to something else, to a bigger picture.
But nothing more.
So did the memory really disappear?
Or, as you tried your best to forget it, your mind broke it up into smaller and smaller fragments, until those fragments became so small that they lost any meaning by themselves?
Why do I think this?
Because I reckon the above scenario happens to everybody. Something that they want to forget never gets truly forgotten. The wrong combination of familiarities, or triggers as I call them, and the whole memory can be dragged back out into the open, plain in sight.
But given enough time and enough distractions, the memory gets more and more fragmented, until it is in so many tiny pieces that it would take a truly horrendously familiar situation to ever pull the complete memory out again.
It’s not really forgetting. It’s just making the memory insignificant enough to never be remembered.
alacarte
Disclaimer: alacarte does not have any qualifications in the field of psychology. Ideas presented above should not be taken as anything more than theories.
1 month ago