Name: Why do we all remember the same things differently?
Uploaded: 2025-07-31T00:14:04.000Z
Duration: 2 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Our memories for what happened are not reality.

Memory is the pattern of neural activity that represents the sights, sounds, smells, feelings, information, language that you experienced when you learned something in the first place.

It's reactivated as a neural circuit in your brain.

In a human brain, there's just under 100 billion neurons.

One neuron is better or worse able to communicate with the neuron that it's connected to, or one of the 10,000 that it's connected to.

Those synapses tend to strengthen when they're used repeatedly and effectively.

When they're not used repeatedly or when they're used rarely or in a mistimed manner, then those synapses tend to weaken.

And the strengthening and the weakening of those synapses is an active biochemical process that makes those adjustments, and when those adjustments persist, that's what we call memory.

This is the part of your brain that links together the sights, the sounds, the smells, the feelings, the language, the information, so that they become connected into a neural circuit.

It turns out that every time we recall a memory for something that happened, we have the opportunity to change it, often not consciously.

If somebody else experienced the same event, they might add some information that we agree with, and so we'll add that to our memory.

We're not simply reproducing what it is that we had experienced.

We're reconstructing, we are building a new experience, and we tend to build those experiences according to the stories that make sense to our minds.

By recognizing that we all have a distorted understanding and recollection of the perception called memory, it demands that you act in the world with a certain sense of humility and empathy for others.

And so the more that we understand about the biology of memory, the science of memory, the more we can develop a better relationship with it.

Your identity is so closely tied to your ability to remember.

Your ability to remember what happened, the story of your life, is really who we say we are.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why do we all remember the same things differently?

perception

process

recognize

opportunity