i'm weaving with tons of embroidery thread right now and listening to a radiolab podcast about memory and forgetting and i learned this: that a "memory" is a) a physical thing (proteins.) and b) (a commonly agreed upon theory) when we remember something we basically are creating a new memory, we're reproducing it and re experiencing it. and every time we remember something we change it in some small subconscious way, so essentially the more you think about something, dwell on it, remember it, recreate it, the less and less you remember the true event itself, because each remembrance yields another changed aspect. and so you never really know if your memories are real or if they're completely fabricated (if theyre 5, 10, 15 years old, and so on) depending on how often you remember them. there is no such thing as storing a memory completely as it is and being able to look at it at a later date, even if it's a second later.
and moreover, the next scenario they provided was: you kiss someone and they kiss you back and then thirty years later, after not thinking about the kiss at all every beyond that original event (somehow), say the man sees the woman getting out of a train and remembers their kiss: then that memory is infinitely more accurate than if he'd been thinking about it every day of his life up to that moment
courage