Remembering a piece of music

[marmaduke]

How can a piece of music be familiar to someone, if they have heard it once, then completely forgotten it and couldn't sing it or play it from memory, yet still know that they had heard it before on hearing it again?

[Scarlett]

The brain is really clever! And massive. How come I can lose my keys, search for them for ages, and then in my sleep, my brain can tell me where they are?! How come I don't know any physics equations, yet when I heard some today, I realised I did know them?

How can we remember verse after verse of obscure songs we learned years ago?

I just think the brain's capacity for storage and recollection is massive and beyond what we can comprehend. I can't remember much about my childhood, but when my Granny started going senile, she became locked in her twenties, and the details she remembered were astounding. Would she have remembered all those if her brain was functioning normally? It was as if she was "losing" all the current memories and all the old ones were surfacing.

It's also like when you hear a theme tune to a kids TV programme that you haven't heard since you were 8. You don't KNOW it, but you totally remember it when you hear it!

[Robinia]

Scarlett is so right, it's amazing what we can store in our brains - I wish sometimes I could de-clutter it & throw out the junk!  Many years ago I was very ill & hardly knew what day it was & yet childhood memories (good ones) kept coming back to me with so much clarity it was amazing!  Once I had recovered they just went back to being the kind of vague pictures that most of us have but it proved that it's all still in there. Funny though, I still haven't rediscovered a lot of what I learned in school!

 When you hear a really old pop song how do you remember all the (sometimes crazy) lyrics & yet I can go up & down the stairs 3 times before I remeber what I wanted up there!!