Why Do We Forget Movies We’ve Watched, Books We’ve Read?

Forgetting a movie or TV show watched or a book read is probably a situation that many people experience. I also experience this situation all the time and I always ask myself: ‘Come on, you forgot what you don’t like, how can you forget what you watched and read with love?’

If you are also experiencing similar situations, you can blame yourself and say ‘Is my memory messed up? Did the part of my brain that deals with memory just stop working?’ Don’t ask. Because the problem is most likely not that your memory is ‘corrupted’.

First of all, let’s look at why not everyone experiences this situation…

Just as there are those who forget all kinds of content they consume, there are also those who remember it down to the smallest detail. This is because, according to neuroscientist David J. Linden of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Everyone’s memory skills are different.

Linden says that while some people may be much more skilled at remembering the text they see on a page or the faces they see on the screen, others may have more advanced skills such as remembering dates or remembering places and directions. But of course thisforget, can’t remember‘ isn’t just because of what aspect of your memory your better at.

How focused are you while watching and reading?

Although many people who experience this condition first think that they have a bad memory, there are actually many reasons why we forget. Professor of psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland. Dr. Kathleen Hourihan describes the first of these factors as ‘How well you pay attention while watching a movie or reading a book affects your level of recall‘ he explains.

So while watching a movie, ‘Oh, this actor was in another movie, what was his name?’ If you think, stop the movie to make a short search, if you’re looking at your phoneIf you’re reading a book, going through the pages quickly or reading a sentence and pondering, it affects how well you remember this movie or book.

Again, according to Hourihan, instead of performing these behaviors, thinking about the content you consume, focusing, connect with your own lifeIdentifying your own story with characters or events makes you remember that content.

Chatting with a friend after consuming a movie or TV show can be more effective than you think.

When you think of memory and remembering, you may be thinking of the act of throwing information into the brain and keeping it inside. But it’s much more than that, according to Sean Kang, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Melbourne. It is as important as throwing information into the brain and remembering it over and over again.. Kang says that this will reinforce the information in question.

So about what you watch, what you read. as you talk to your friends The information is reinforced as you recall the subject from the halls of your brain over and over again. Thus, it becomes more difficult for you to forget that content. You can liken this to the fact that teachers reinforce the subject by doing quizzes and orals as they cover the subjects.

Consuming too much content makes it hard to remember what we consumed

Another common explanation brought by different experts on the subject is today’s content consumption habits It proves how it affects our memory.

Like watching lots of movies or reading lots of books, according to Linden. repetitive behaviorsmakes memories of those contents ‘general’ in our memory. Our brain moves on with the current ones by throwing the old information back. Unless that information is repeated, it becomes difficult to remember. Instead of the whole plot, characters, lines, we ‘reflect’ that content or memory.useful, useless, beautiful, ugly’ experiential traces, such as finding

Now we finish the series in one sitting and move on to the new one, We watch tens, maybe hundreds of videos every day.At a time when we can access countless movies with one click, we consume so much content that our rate of remembering each one separately is also decreasing.

For example, do you remember used to be talked about for weeks when a viral video came out on the internet, going from hand to hand, everyone was laughing and talking about it. Because the number of content on the Internet was not as endless as it is now.

That’s exactly why you don’t easily remember a video you watched on TikTok today that was funny to you, while the videos that were viral in those years are on everyone’s mind even now. because there are manyAnother video takes its place before it has a permanent place in your memory.

We no longer rely on our memory but on a Google search

Another factor is that we don’t use our memory that often to recall information anymore. All explanations based on the time devoted to the content consumed, how much we think about it, and how much we repeat it. what are we doing?

When we need to consume fast, distract our attention frequently while watching or reading, switch to a new one without thinking about it and remember something about it. instead of straining our memory we type into Google. This means that we meet almost no requirements to remember the content.

However, according to experts, you don’t have to remember a movie, book or any content for it to leave a mark on you or be valuable to you. Because although it is pleasant to remember the details, What really matters is the trace it leaves on our subconscious and how we encode that experience.. Remembering no detail of that movie that changed our lives always remains the same!