Why do we remember some life moments but not others? | Hacker News Reader

Why do we remember some life moments but not others?

bu.edu

119 pointshhs58 comments

"The wilderness isn't quite what I expected. It's kinda... wild. I mean, it's not like they made it sound in my book. My dad made it sound so easy. He's really good at camping and how to make fire from rocks and stuff. He used to come to all my sweat lodge meetings. And afterwards we'd go get ice cream at Fenton's. I always get chocolate and he gets butter brickle. Then we'd sit on this one curb right outside, and I'll count all the blue cars and he counts all the red ones, and whoever gets the most wins. I like that curb.

That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most."

--Up

> That might sound boring, but I think the boring stuff is the stuff I remember the most."

There is no such thing as "quality time", only "time" (together).

you seem to be having together do the work of quality; were i to say "what about time together with a friend distracted by their phone?" you could say "oh, that is not quality time" or "but you aren't really together"

nothing wrong with contemplating whether these things are the same or different, just pointing out it can be hard to sum up complexity with single phrase aphorisms

I remember the dumbest things from eons ago…

In a drivers ed meeting.. teacher talking about stop lights, he mentions the cross walk signs and said “Well get to those soon..”. But he never did.

I think about this way too much.

If you’re still waiting: you should stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk

A perpetual unclosed paren of your life.

Conversely, I haven’t thought about drivers ed in 25 years and you just brought probably 40 very distinct memories back to mind about everything related to learning to drive for me that I haven’t thought about in a long, long time.

I also remember drivers ed. It was this enormous class of like 90 people over February break packed into the tightest room you can imagine. I sat in the same spot near the back every day. The girl in front of me also sat in the same spot every day, in front of me. She was extremely attractive and she wore a thong every day that stuck out of her low-rise jeans.

It drove me crazy. Absolutely insane. Every day, trapped in this stuffy room, with this insanely hot girl that drove me crazy. I couldn’t think.

On the last day, I asked if she wanted to go to the arcade or movies sometime. I had to take my shot. She said “No” with no emotion or any thinking really.

That is my overwhelming memory of drivers ed. The sexual frustration of my 16 year old body followed by embarrassment and failure.

The driver’s license was great though

It’s been what… 15-20 years since the ads ran but…

“I HAVE A STRUCTURED SETTLEMENT BUT I NEED CASH NOW!!

CALL JG WENTWORTH, 877-CASH-NOW!!”

It pops into my head at least once a month, and it sits for 1-3 days on repeat in my brain. I swear it was some MK-Ultra level psyops level writing, whoever came up with those commercials.

Have you tried calling the number?

It's my money and I need it NOW!

Damnit, I can’t unsee this comment. Now it’s living rent free. Yeah I remember this distinctly. Odd that better call saul didn’t remind me of this one though.

800 588 2300 empire today

The lesson was patience. You passed.

> Memory isn’t just a passive recording device: our brains decide what matters, and emotional events can reach back in time to stabilize fragile memories

So they are saying … attention is all you need? :-) If it’s surprising or shocking enough you’ll pay very close attention to it and remember it.

Also smells have a very strong recall factor. You smell the same unique smell and it immediately takes you back to the time and place. At least that’s how it works for me.

For those who don't get the reference. It's googles breakthrough paper on LLM's.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762

Those of us subscribing to AI newsletters are constantly slapped in the face with “___ is all you need” style jokes, such that I didn’t even register someone might not make that connection.

I have a pet theory that the reason that smell-based memory is so strong has something to do with the fact it’s the only sense that bypasses the thalamus. Smell is wired up to the brain… differently

Yeah, that mirrors my anecdotal experience. Certain smells give me a sensation of recall very different from simply thinking or remembering something.

I think it's a bit opposite. If you are really paying attention you probably don't need to remember the event since you already processed it properly at that time.

You tend to generally remember stuff that you didn't process properly or generated a ton of emotions that are more than the baseline.

> You smell the same unique smell and it immediately takes you back to the time and place. At least that’s how it works for me.

I have experienced this too. Recently I was in new place I've never been before and while waiting in line at a shop, I randomly smelled something that instantly gave me déjà vu for my very early childhood, like age 5 or less. It was wild how vivid and fleeting it was - it lasted only for a moment but I remember the sensation.

As a very young child, I grew up in the remote hill country of the Pacific Northwest. Thirty years later, I moved to Seattle and decided to go hiking in the Cascades. The smell of those mountains immediately unleashed memories I didn’t know I had. It was really unexpected how much memory was keyed to that smell. Also, that smell induced a strange feeling like I was supposed to be there as if it was my native environment, and I hadn’t lived in the region for decades.

I am an avid outdoorsman. One thing I have realized is that every wilderness locale has a distinct natural smell. It isn’t just the plants but also the minerals, soil, and bacteria that live in that environment. There are vast regions of the US where I can probably identify the locale with some degree of fidelity by the smell. It is a bit like how an expert sommelier can identify wines. Civilization is more hit and miss but wilderness is almost fingerprinted by its smell.

Humans are clearly capable of sensing it and imprinting based on it. We don’t think about it much but it is there.

Going without food for a few days, or packing light and eating light, my nose goes crazy. I can smell everything.

Definitely! This makes me think of petrichor, the earthy smells released during rain, in urban environments is very local and memory triggering because it's tied to bacterial soil/rock/plant composition. There's something visceral about it for me because my default model of memories is audio and video playback, and the smell hits me with a forgotten dimension when I go back to a place and it rains.

I don't know, i think it varies with people. For me smells do not stimulate memory recall at all.

My father kept an old closet with simple personal stuff in our basement and was opening and smelling it in order to remember his childhood. This continued for 60+ years.

"Some memories are easy to recall—lush with detail, fresh as the moment itself."

Opening line. If you don't recognize yourself in this then you may want to Google "SDAM": severely deficient autobiographical memory. It's more common than you'd expect.

Level of cringe is directly proportional to how strongly the moment will be recorded in your memory

Strongly agree. For obvious reasons, I can't site any personal anecdotes but there are things I wish I could forget but couldn't.

Cringe Trauma. Those embarrassing moments that just seem to pop up randomly. It feel like similar symptoms to ptsd but obviously lower intensity.

There's an arbitrariness, a mundaneness to some indelible memories that defies this explanation. Or any explanation like this. It feels partly true. But there's got to be more, in my experience.

When I was six, I was standing in the middle of my bedroom, nothing particularly interesting was happening, and I said to myself " I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life". And I did.

I would say being 6, standing in your bedroom and thinking "I'm going to remember this moment for the rest of my life" would fall under "particular interesting event".

I think it's also an old greentext. (A quick search doesn't turn up exactly that, though I'm sure I remember it with slightly different wording, but there is https://www.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/a6ucsc/anon_reme....)

Well you can't say that for certain, yet...

What I find fascinating with those is that there is no way to tell if it's a real memory or not.

> It feels partly true

I think that's the most we can ever expect from studying a complex system.

On the arbitrariness, I wonder how it goes if a triggering event happens, the circumstances are retroactively prioritized as well, but down the line the event itself gets forgotten/deprioritized.

In computer terms, it's probably not some atomic transaction that will be fully rolled back, and it probably can misfire as well, so there must be a wealth of memories that are attached to the same prioritization principle but in some broken way.

I could never remember things/events/past times. I thought it was just how I worked.

When my life fell apart and I needed strength, I remembered so many moments. All those moments with my kids I was afraid/thought I forgot. When my mom got sick/was passing I remembered so many moments with her to remind her of to make her feel special/like she would be remembered. I think we just don't really care most of the time so don't flex that muscle so we don't realize how much we remember.

Weak memory rescue or emotional tagging is well studied for decades https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9378568/

Everyone remembers what they were doing on September 11

I think to remember something, you have to replay it in your mind from time to time. The more you do that, the more you remember. (Reminiscing is probably the right word).

I guess differentiator between the "style" of memories is your personality and what you dwell on.

It's also scientifically proven that every time you recall a memory you change it. In other words - your further experience can affect the memory of past events.

In the brain memory is implemented diffusely in broad regions in the lobes, rather that in sticks like in computers. It becomes heavily connected, depended and sometimes indistinguishable from other mental functions (emotions, executions, decisions etc). No surprise, a lot of mechanisms and paths come to play.

As a supporting point, I think it's connected not only with mental functions, but also our senses.

I have a weak memory in general, but I always remember the most mundane things in my life that I had no idea I still contained in my brain, triggered by a specific smell.

Another example is that when I moved to a new street, while crossing one road, I stumbled upon the edge of tram road and almost fell. Two years and counting, my brain always brings this memory up while passing the same point on the road..

I recommend people read "Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die" by Dan Heath

some moment or ideas is more memorable than others simply because human mind is "simple"

There’s things I wish I didn’t remember. Years of abuse.

This is me. There are so many things I don't remember about my childhood. My brother was lucky and lived with my grandparents for many years. I was stuck in hell with my physically/verbally abusive father and my pill head mother trying to OD about once a year.

It bothers me when he brings events up that he remembers clearly and swears I was there...family get together and birthdays. But I have zero recollection. I only remember the bad things.

I'm in my early 50's and just now beginning to enjoy life and feeling happiness for the first time in my life. I met a great woman that is loving, caring, great cook and has a 160 acre farm with Bortle 3.9 night skies. I have a good reason to drag out my heavy ass 10" telescope out now.

I’m glad it worked out for you in the end.

Glad you’re doing better! I learned about the Bortle scale from your comment. I’d love to live in a place that allowed all the celestial light to arrive.

So sorry bro, you're living proof things can get better and i hope you enjoy your time on this molten ball of rock with her

Isn't this obvious? Anyone who was old enough to remember 9/11 whom I've spoken to can recall several mundane aspects of that day.

"Previous studies have disagreed on whether or not weaker memories are stabilized, or made easier to recall, by attachment to a more prominent one."

So doesn't seem that obvious at all.

I remember random mundane events from tons of random days, unconnected to any prominent event (as near as I can determine anyway). And I also remember some random mundane stuff from days something prominent did happen. Whether there's a bias towards days with prominent events is entirely unclear to me.

> Anyone who was old enough to remember 9/11 whom I've spoken to can recall several mundane aspects of that day.

The subtitle addresses this:

  BU study finds memories of mundane incidents can be 
  strengthened when they get attached to a memory of an 
  emotionally charged event[0]

0 - https://www.bu.edu/articles/2025/why-do-we-remember-some-mom...

Honestly, I’m glad my memory isn’t better.

The other day my wife said “remember when [our daughter] screamed for the whole morning on vacation?”

But I didn’t until she reminded me in detail. Having a fuller memory seems likely to contain more stressful moments.

There are other benefits.

- You can read your favourite books every couple of years and not be bored.

- You can watch your favourite Movies and TV Serials every few years. (almost time for Expanse rewatch..)

- IMO it makes you a better/gentler person. I don't hold grudges because I can't be arsed to remember why exactly I was mad at someone.

I think that's simply because you ARE a good person. You could as well dislike someone without even remembering what happened.

> - IMO it makes you a better/gentler person. I don't hold grudges because I can't be arsed to remember why exactly I was mad at someone.

Something I have to keep reminding people. The person you are mad at probably has no recollection or memory of what upset you.

That time I drove to the store three years ago to pick up some milk and bananas, I totally don't remember where I parked.

Memorable moments have to be different:

- They can't be repeating signals that are uninteresting (e.g. remembering a particular time you brushed your teeth)

- They can't be random noise (remembering the pattern of some ceiling tiles or something).

Hofstadter's "aperiodic crystals" concept is related to this.

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