A couple of days ago a friend of mine introduced me to a friend of his. The moment I saw her I had a feeling that we had met before… It was like ‘I have seen this face before’ but she immediately replied saying she had never met me before. A little embarrassed and very confused I continued the conversation which branched away elsewhere.

After a few minutes of conversation it turned out we had studied in the same college, but in different classes. That didnt exactly mean that we had met, there were about a thousand students in that college. With over 150 in my class itself I was pretty sure I hadnt met everyone of them during my short two years there. Then the conversation went on and we realized that we lived in the same area… Thats when she mentioned another friend of mine with whom i had been to college with. Putting one and one together it turned out we had for about a year taken the same bus to college everyday, nine years ago!

I was personally amazed by how I had realized that I had seen her before. I am not really good with faces, I tend to remember names better. The odd thing was that I couldn’t place her in a single incident/event that I remembered…

The reason I am mentioning this is that I recently was reading about memories and how the brain works with them. According to the book/study/show(cant remember which) every moment of our active lives we are bombarding the brain with information. For the brain to work normally it needs to sort out this information and choose what it believes will be required in the future. The brain in this process of weeding out ‘forgets’ majority of the data it has been provided. Also when a certain memory has not been recalled for a long time the brain slowly forgets the memory.

With that I spent the evening thinking about how awesome it is what the brain does and how well it does it.