You visit your childhood home, walk into your old bedroom and encounter a wave of nostalgic memories. What triggers this memory? How do you suddenly remember things you might not have thought of in decades?
The researchers found that the context in which memories are made is important in remembering them later . This idea is known as contextual constraint theory. It focuses on three components: context learning, context changing, and memory seeking.
Scientists have found out why old memories flood back when people visit places in the past.
The context in which memories are made is important in remembering them later.
Contextual learning is established that learning in the brain occurs by an associative process. If A and B occur together, they become linked. Contextual binding theory goes one step further: A and B are not only linked to each other, but also to the context in which they occur.
So what is the context? It’s not just your physical location, it’s a mental state including the thoughts, feelings, and other mental activity you’re experiencing at a given time.
As a result, each memory is associated with different context states. However, some context states will be similar perhaps because they have the same location or mood or have some other factor.
Similarities between contexts are important when it comes to recalling memories. Your memory search is quite similar to a Google search, in that you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for if your search terms match the source content. During a memory search, your current mental context is the set of search terms.
These mechanisms are simple but the meaning is profound. In theory, you are most likely to remember memories from contexts similar to the one you currently have. Because your mental context is always changing, your mental context will resemble the memories of your most recent experience. This explains why older events are harder to remember.
But of course, old memories have been forgotten forever. If you can change your context to resemble seemingly long-forgotten memories, you’ll be able to remember them. This is why old memories flood back when you walk into your childhood bedroom or walk through your old school.
Context-dependent memory was confirmed by a 1975 experiment in which divers memorized lists of words and were then tested both on land and underwater. On land, their recall was best for words they had learned on land, while underwater, they remembered the lists of words they learned underwater better.
This phenomenon is not limited to physical locations. You may have noticed that when you are sad about something, you tend to remember other sad events in your life. This is because your moods and emotions also include your mental context. Experiments have confirmed that memory is enhanced when your current mood matches the mood in which you learned the information.
More than a century of research has confirmed that we also remember things better if we experience them at different times, rather than over and over. This is one of the main reasons why, when preparing for exams, a regular study routine is more effective than instant cramming.