Meryl Horne

And it was just, like, gone one day.

And then...

eventually just came back to me randomly when I was like in an elevator.

But like, what was that?

Like, that feels worse than normal.

I called up Charan Ranganath, professor at the University of California, Davis, to talk about this.

What would you say to that 90%?

Our brain wants to forget most stuff.

That's actually by design.

Yeah.

Yeah, but that's normal.

Like, OK, so like the point of memory isn't to log everything that's happening to us, that barrage.

Like right now, there are probably things happening to you that aren't even kind of making it to your conscious awareness.

Right.

Like the feeling of the chair on your butt.

probably weren't even thinking about that, right?

Right, right.

And then there's the stuff that, like, makes it over that first hurdle, so you're aware of it, but the brain decides, like, eh, it's not really important to store that.

Huh.

A lot of the things I feel like I tend to forget are just really boring or like meaningless to me.