Similar memories get mixed up

Yesterday’s lunch, or the day before?

Key ideaSimilar memories blur together, and we can’t pull them out

This board also holds 6 pictures, but this time each picture was stored the simplest way, just piling its links on top of the others. We show a piece of the cake, and what comes back is not the cake but a blob of several pictures mixed together. When similar shapes pile up on the same links, you can no longer tell which picture is which. It is like mixing up yesterday’s lunch with the day before’s.

Why?Many studies suggest that the biggest cause of forgetting is not time, but other memories. New learning can cover old memories, and old memories can get in the way of new ones. That is why studying similar subjects back to back is more confusing.

Go furtherThe “From one piece” scene in Chapter 3 uses a method that stores only the parts it does not already know, so the pictures do not blend. The same 6 pictures behave very differently depending on how they are stored. Memories getting in each other’s way is called interference, and the hippocampus is thought to make similar memories more different before storing them.