Forgetting a movie or TV show watched or a book read is probably a situation that many people experience. I also experience this situation all the time and I always ask myself ‘Come on, you forgot what you don’t like, how can you forget what you watched and read with love?’
If you are experiencing similar situations, you may ask yourself, ‘Is my memory bad? Did the part of my brain that deals with memory just stop working?’ Don’t ask. Because the problem is most likely not that your memory is ‘corrupted’.
First of all, let’s look at why not everyone experiences this situation…
Just as there are those who forget all kinds of content they consume, there are also those who remember it down to the smallest detail. That’s because everyone’s memory skills are different, according to neuroscientist David J. Linden of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Linden says that while some people may be more adept at remembering the text they see on a page or the faces they see on the screen, others may have more advanced skills such as remembering dates or remembering places and directions. But of course, the only reason for this ‘forgetting, not remembering’ state is not just about which aspect of your memory your memory is more agile.
How focused are you while watching and reading?
Although many people who experience this condition first think that they have a bad memory, there are actually many reasons why we forget. Professor of psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Kathleen Hourihan explains the first of these factors as ‘How well you pay attention while watching a movie or reading a book affects your level of recall’.
So while watching a movie, ‘Oh, this actor was in another movie, what was his name?’ If you stop the movie to make a short call, look at your phone, go through the pages quickly while reading a book, or if you read a sentence and dive into deep thoughts, this affects how well you remember the movie or the book.
Again, according to Hourihan, instead of performing these behaviors, thinking about the content you consume, focusing, connecting with your own life, identifying your own story with the characters or events helps you remember that content.
Chatting with a friend after consuming a movie or TV show can be more effective than you think.
When you think of memory and remembering, you may be thinking of the act of throwing information into the brain and keeping it inside. But according to Sean Kang, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Melbourne, it’s much more than that, and it’s just as important to get information out and remember it over and over again as it is to throw information into the brain. Kang says that this will reinforce the information in question.
In other words, as you talk to your friends about what you’ve watched and read, the information gets stronger as you recall the subject from the tunnels of your brain over and over. Thus, it becomes more difficult for you to forget that content. You can liken this to the fact that teachers reinforce the subject by doing quizzes and orals as they cover the subjects.
Consuming too much content makes it hard to remember what we consumed
Another common explanation brought to the subject by different experts is to prove how today’s content consumption habits affect our memory.
According to Linden, repetitive behaviors such as watching a lot of movies or reading a lot of books make memories of that content ‘general’ in our memory. Our brain continues on the road with the current ones by throwing the old information back. Unless that information is repeated, it becomes difficult to remember. What remains are experiential traces such as finding that content or memory ‘useful, useless, beautiful, ugly’ instead of all the plot, characters and lines.
Now, in a period when we finish a series in one sitting and switch to a new one, watch tens, maybe hundreds of videos every day, and can access countless movies with one click, we consume so much content that our rate of remembering each one separately decreases.
For example, do you remember, when a viral video came out on the internet, it was talked about for weeks, it was passed around, everyone was laughing and talking about it. Because the number of content on the Internet was not as endless as it is now.
That’s exactly why you don’t easily remember a video you watched on TikTok today that was funny to you, while the videos that were viral in those years are on everyone’s mind even now. Because there are so many, another video takes its place before it has a permanent place in your memory.
We no longer rely on our memory but on a Google search
Another factor is that we don’t use our memory that often to recall information anymore. What do we do when all descriptions are based on the time devoted to the content consumed, how much we think about it, and how much we repeat it?
Instead of straining our memory, we write to Google when we need to consume it quickly, distract ourselves frequently while watching or reading, switch to a new one without thinking about it, and remember something about it. This means that we meet almost no requirements to remember the content.
However, according to experts, you don’t have to remember a movie, book or any content for it to leave a mark on you or be valuable to you. Because although it is pleasant to remember the details, the most important thing is the trace it leaves on our subconscious and how we encode that experience. Remembering no details of that movie that changed our lives always stays the same!
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