Sorry… I Can’t Remember That
👉 This is part of The Pervasive Now
Memories are collected through the hippocampus every time we have a new or novel experience. So we’re struggling to remember it all when life begins to blur at the edges.
Evidence A: This is Your Brain on Tiktok
“Cheetos are one of the most marvelously constructed foods on the planet, in terms of pure pleasure. If something melts down quickly, your brain thinks there’s no calories in it… you can just keep eating it forever”
A food scientist once explained how Cheetos are so damn addictive: vanishing caloric density. Eugene Wei saw that this concept applies to addictive nature of junk social: “Tiktok is entertainment Cheetos. Each video requires so little cognitive exertion and reaches its climax so quickly it feels like we could keep watching forever… as soon as we swipe up the previous one melts in our memory.”.
Evidence B: What Pandemic?
Through the monotony and information overload of covid-19 we struggled to create new memories: “The memory sort of puts it together as almost one event, so we have quite unclear memories from those years”, explains Professor Dorthe Berntsen. Stress also interferes. Since the dark years, we’ve been out living life, which fills our minds with more salient, easier to remember events. So, as traumatic as it was, history forgets and so do we.
