What Is Memory? (And Why Do I Forget Where I Put My Shoes?)

What is memory, really—and why can you remember your first day of school but not where you left your shoes 10 minutes ago? In this episode of Explain It Like I’m 5, Alex unpacks the science and psychology of memory, explaining how your brain encodes, stores, and retrieves information. Instead of a perfect mental filing cabinet, memory is a constantly changing system that recreates your experiences like a recipe each time you recall them.

We explore the key brain regions involved in memory—like the hippocampus (your “save button”), amygdala (emotion tagger), prefrontal cortex (organizer), and areas that store procedural memory (like riding a bike). Alex breaks down types of memory: sensory, short-term, working, and long-term, plus the difference between explicit (conscious) and implicit (unconscious) memory.

The episode explains why we forget—encoding failures, storage decay, retrieval problems, and interference—and how this leads to everyday slip-ups like losing your shoes or walking into a room and forgetting why. We dive into false memories, flashbulb memories, and déjà vu, and how emotion makes some memories stick like glue. You’ll also hear fun facts about memory capacity, the role of sleep, the “doorway effect,” and why London taxi drivers have larger hippocampi.

Finally, Alex covers how memory changes across life, how to improve memory with strategies like chunking, mnemonics, visualization, and repetition, and why memory is deeply tied to identity. By the end, you’ll see memory not as a failing hard drive, but as a living, flexible system that makes you you—even if it occasionally forgets your shoes.