42: The Answer to Almost Everything · Season 1 · Episode 82
Why do we lose our memory?
Sunday, July 16 · 30 min
We've all experienced it: a name that slips our mind or a new password. Forgetting is annoying and sometimes embarrassing. But how does the brain decide what we forget? There's a kind of competition among our memories. Stronger, more repeated impressions prevail over weaker ones. But are these erased memories lost forever? This question has been the subject of debate for decades. But in recent years, a new idea has emerged! It's possible that memories still exist. "If we stimulate the cells, the memories become available again. So, memory survives the forgetting process, but it only re-emerges under the right conditions. In a sense, this could mean that we lose the address of the memory, but not the memory itself," explains neuroscientist Tomás Ryan. Could we one day recover all our memories?
