Do you suffer from forgetfulness? This is a sign of a special working capacity of the brain

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Have you ever bumped into a colleague in a supermarket at work and didn't recognize him? Your brilliant and lazy brain is to blame.

New research by Associate Professor Oliver Bauman from Bond University sheds new light on how the body's most complex organ captures memories.

Researchers specifically studied , how the brain reacts when people first encounter a person or object out of context.

Dr. Baumann said that because we have ever seen a colleague in the office, the memory system seems to create a snapshot , which unites the person and the office.

“Our brain believes that this person belongs in this room. If you meet them somewhere else, it will be a problem because you may not recognize them. This does not happen when our brain learns that the person exists independently of the room. The second time, the third time, our brain will not make this mistake again, but encode the person and the room separately. .

“This ensures that we are not overloading our brain and wasting space and energy.”

Dr Baumann said the results provide insight into how our memory system strives for efficiency and codes only what it absolutely needs.

“Forgetfulness can be considered a feature because we should not code more than we need to, and more is not always better.”

People with hyperthymesia remember almost everything in their lives, and while this seems like a graceful feat, there is also a downside because they have such a vast amount of information that it becomes very difficult to focus on a task at hand.