Question about memories and brain function

We probably don't have any amateur neurologists or psychologists here, but i'll ask anyway. Why is it that random moments in our lives become stamped in our brains as memories? For example, i listen to Bob Marley and i end up remember one my earliest memories from when i was about 4. I'm in the front seat of my Uncle Jimmy's car, we're all driving somewhere at night, and Jamming is playing on the radio. The memory as it exists in my mind is just a frozen image of when i took a glance at the radio, and out of the corner of the image i can see the through the windscreen, we're up on a hill or something, and down below is a town, all lit up. And i hear playing in the background 'Yeah, we're jamming, jamming, I wanna jam it with you...'

There's nothing particularly special about that moment, yet it's one of the things my mind associates with Bob Marley. Similarly, other random things have their own random memory. What's with that? How does it work?

The truth is, no one is entirely sure why memory works like that sometimes. There are a variety of good theories, but experimentation seems to suggest that these memories seem random because they are random. They often have less to do with what was happening at that moment and more to do with what was happening inside you. For example, most of these types of memories are formed when people are young but not too young; i.e. teenage or pre-teen. The brain and the body are going through changes that can simulate strong sensations from even ordinairy stimulus.

I have a similar memory of an unimpressive book (From the awful television version of HG Well's War of the Worlds) associated with riding in my grandmother's car and hearing a Paula Abdul song from when I was a kid. It's not even a good memory, just one of the things that got stuck in some kind of association loop in my head. In fact, for me at least, the last one of these associations I'm aware of formed when I was almost twenty, and it's of an Enya song playing while I read one of the Wheel of Time books. That's over ten years ago.

If you want to hear my guess, I think that strong associations in your mind can form from data which isn't obvious to you. Your memories can be influenced by especially interesting things going on even if you aren't aware of them on a conscious level (In the same way you aren't aware of the digestion of food, but the types of things in the food can have a huge impact on the performance of your brain and body). Your mind made a connection at a level below the conscious threshold which was important to a lot of other connections, so that the memory has a lot of triggers and a high rate of recurrence, reinforcing it often despite it's apparent meaninglessness.

I would suggest reading some of Daniel Dennet's works on the subject (Freedom Evolves and/or Sweet Dreams) and then picking through some of his critic's works as well. I'm working my way through Pinker's Stuff of Thought at the moment, but the work is much drier and so harder to find time to finish. :laugh4:

:egypt:

Funnily, when I was perhaps ten, or there about, and on my way to a holiday destination; I said to myself that I wanted to "save" (inspired by computer terminology) a particular scenery: a steep grayish mountain side just to the right of the road. I remembered myself of that scenery every now and then; and as a result, it stuck. I don't know where this mountain side is located, however.

I also have alot of the memories described above. Yeah, quite alot when I think of it. I'm not sure how much I can trust them, however; and if I try to remember more than what appears at first glance, I'll be at a risk of inventing something that's not in my memories.

to the music side I think they call it musical memory... those are memory blocks triggered by music, I have a lot of those moments , if somehting really important, interesting or anythng happens when a song is in the background... whenever I listen again to that song I'll remember what happened ...

I remember dancing excitedly at about 3 years old to a vinyl record playing Jerry Lee Lewis's "Great Balls of Fire." It's still one of my favorite songs.

Go figure.