This can be a memory that gets triggered when you smell, touch, see, hear or taste something. For example a particular photograph, food, song that takes you back to a particular time, place, person etc.
If so, I’d love to hear from you! Any photographs that may help tell the story would be fantastic too. By sending content, you are agreeing to have it featured in a very limited print university publication (1-5 copies). If you wish to remain anonymous that’s absolutely fine, but if you wish to specify your age and location, it would be very helpful.
The brain is a marvelous piece of complex connections and processes, and it stores a huge amount of information, even memories you didn’t know you still had. I am not talking about the fictional 90% of “unused” space that some people still seem to believe in, I am really talking about things you can test right here, right now. Forum user SixWinged has a youtube channel, BrainUp, where he posted a video demonstrating what I mean.
We all have millions of memories stored, you just don’t know you have them until something triggers them. I have songs that remind me of people and moments in my life, there are moments in movies that trigger memories, and a single picture can be enough to remember an entire vacation. Usually you are not bothered by the memory, because there is no reason for your brain to bring it to your attention.
I normally can’t speak for others, but here I can say that at least 99,99% of all people on earth will have those kinds of memories. I would love to give you some, but I would like some more information about what it is for exactly and what it will be used for.
I call them “memory doors”, since I don’t know the official name.* I’m a little bit obsessive about metacognition, so I notice these all the time.
My brain is frequently doing this:
What am I thinking?
What triggered that thought?
Then I start following streams of association to see where they lead.
Because I pay attention to it frequently, my brain tends to flash back through a sequence of “memory doors” when something catches my attention.
I have a collection of symbols that map to concepts that have no name. (I’ve been saving that topic for a blog post.) My internal symbol for “memory doors” is ד, pronounced “dalet”. This is one reason why I picked up the Ben System rather than sticking with the Dominic System. I needed more symbols for my internal language.
