The psychological reason you remember song lyrics from decades ago but forget what you ate yesterday - Silicon Canals

"You know that song from 1987? The one you haven't heard in years? Start playing it right now and I bet you'll nail every word, every pause, every dramatic key change. Meanwhile, you're standing in front of your open refrigerator wondering if you already ate lunch today. This isn't just you being forgetful or having selective memory. There's actually fascinating psychology behind why your brain holds onto those old Backstreet Boys lyrics like precious gems while treating yesterday's breakfast like trash to be deleted."

"Your brain is basically a very picky librarian Think of your memory as a massive library with an extremely opinionated librarian who decides what stays on the shelves and what gets tossed. This librarian has very specific criteria for what makes the cut, and spoiler alert: your Tuesday night dinner rarely meets the standards. When researchers look at how memories form and stick around, they've found that our brains are constantly making decisions about what information deserves the VIP treatment of long-term storage."

"Most daily activities fall into what psychologists call " routine memory " territory. These are the things we do on autopilot, like eating meals, brushing our teeth, or driving familiar routes. Your brain sees these as background noise, not worth the neural real estate needed for permanent storage. But music? Music gets the red carpet treatment. When you first heard that song in high school, your brain wasn't just processing words."

Memory functions like a highly selective librarian that continuously evaluates incoming information and allocates neural resources. Routine activities usually occupy autopilot "routine memory" and register as background noise, so they are not prioritized for permanent storage. Music combines melody, rhythm, emotional context, and social or developmental associations, producing elaborative encoding that creates robust, multi-layered memory traces. Emotions enhance consolidation and act as glue that cements certain events more firmly in long-term storage. The brain favors multi-sensory, emotionally salient experiences and grants them VIP treatment over mundane daily details.

Read at Silicon Canals