HOW COULD WE not? Taking vision alone, our eyes make saccades (large eye movements) about five or six times a second, and take in vast quantities of information each time. The visual system in the brain then begins throwing away most of that information in order to select what it needs us to see and respond to. If we had to remember everything we looked at in a single minute, it would mean several hundred highly detailed images. Our brains would be completely swamped and we would be unable to understand what we saw. As for life events, the problem is not just how much information is stored, but how it can be retrieved. We may hold memories for some fact or event but then be unable to find them fast enough when we want to. And then there might be ‘motivated forgetting’, when we simply do not want to remember something painful or unpleasant. Memories may not be completely lost even when they seem to be forgotten.
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