These little experiences that bring back certain memories in us
At times, when we are least expecting it, certain memories can suddenly come flooding back to us. The cause might be some of the behaviours that we engage in.
When you least anticipate it, when you are about to fall asleep, when you let your thoughts to wander while riding public transport or when you are cooking meals, your brain will bring back a memory that has been buried for a very long time when you are not expecting it.
These brief moments from your past can be confused due to the rapid and unexpected character of the events that occurred in them, regardless of whether they are joyful or bad memories.
Exist any stimuli that bring about these recollections? Is it possible that our acts unconsciously bring up specific memories? In January of this year, Andrew Laughland and Lia Kvavilashvili published a study on the recurrence of memories when driving on a regular basis. This was done in order to have a deeper understanding of the topic.
Recordings of Andrew Laughland's commute from his place of employment to his residence were kept for a period of one and a half years. The twenty journeys that he took, during which he verbalised his ideas and, as a result, his "involuntary autobiographical memories," were documented.
At the conclusion of his experiment, Andrew Laughland discovered that he had documented a far greater number of memories than the individuals who had participated in earlier research on the topic.
In spite of the fact that these researchers, who were cataloguing memories with clickers, established rates ranging from 22 per day to 10 per hour, the audio recordings of the researchers revealed a rate of approximately one per minute.
According to the findings of the study, features that are new or unexpected that are met while travel, such as the weather conditions or songs that are playing on the radio, are significantly more likely to evoke memories than aspects that are always there, such as the scenery.
In addition, Andrew Laughland observed that twenty-three percent of the memories that were recorded were "chains of memories," which means that one memory linked to another memory.
In the end, the researcher was able to determine, through the examination of his audio recordings, that his recollections were not as unexpected as they appeared to be. Cues that occurred a few seconds or even many minutes before the event in question were truly responsible for bringing up certain memories.