h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/alabaster/F19585?thread=5994905&post=70471921#p70471921 I ask on behalf of someone else, but I want to know too, as my own experiences bear that out.

Should I answer my own question?

It was actually a bit of a rhetorical one, but it seems someone else really wants to know

You probably remember what you wrote two years ago.

Occasionally I find stuff I wrote 5 or 6 or 7 years ago on this site and I can't remember it at all. And I talked then about things I now don't know about.

I'd agree with Gnomon - I sometimes look back through scripts and such that I wrote 10 or so years ago and, not only can I not remember writing it, I can't imagine how I could have written it!

is the brain like a vast memory store but the mind like a small processor and you only down load a bit at a time so you do not have immediate access to the entire memory????

Yes, I think so.

Experiments with "truth drugs" show that most people actually remember just about everything, but they differ in their ability to recall the information. It's there but you might not be able to get at it.

This is why sometimes when you smell a particular smell, you may suddenly remember a scene you thought you had forgotten, but it is held in your memory linked to that smell.

People with conditions like Alzheimers actually lose their memories - the brain is progressively damaged by the disease and the memories are then irretrievable.

It always amazes me just what you can remember, when pushed to it... I keep thinking I really can't remember hardly anything of my university degrees, but as soon as I'm reminded of stuff, talking to someone about their medical condition, or something to do with human biology, then suddenly I can useually recall stuff I'd relaly imagined that I'd long ago forgotten all the detail of

And with the posting/reading what you wrote years ago on HooToo, its a bit of a mix, sometimes I'll find something I wrote only a few months, or a couple of years ago, and not remember it at all, and other times I'll read something from ages* back,a nd not only remember it but remember writing it, and remember where I was whilst writing it so a bit selective perhaps on what and when we can recall data from our datastorage banks

The subject here attracts attention - but they were your own words...

What I find even stranger is that, when looking something up (in a book), I know where (on a page) to look, eg on the right, at the bottom - when I can recall the sense but not the words.

Well, less so nowadays...!

Now. There was a passage in Moonfleet - I'm going back a good few years to my schooldays here - which covered this phenomenon, to explain how someone down a well was able to quickly spot a crest or some such markings on a stone...

Let me see if I can dig it up (and can quote it without being modded)

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Moonfleet/Chapter_15

More about recognising or hearing your own name, but same effect at work.

I sometimes find myself reading old conversations and reading a post which seems to agree quite well with me or be well written, only to find it is actually an old post of mine. So I don´t remember them. I can however remember pieces of conversations I had a decade ago.

2legs, didn't you recently post something like "I knew there was a Guide Entry on that subject, but I'd forgotten it was me who wrote it"?

I can't remember what the subject was, now.

TRiG.

It was swallowing. I teased him about forgetting