strange non-associative memory

This isn’t quite qualified for deep psychological discussion (or maybe it is) but I thought I’d put it here…

Over the past 10 years or so I’ve been experiencing this phenomenon where memories pop into my consciousness that are seemingly unrelated to what I’m doing presently…

These are memories that could be something someone said to me, or an action…but they don’t hold any real significance (at least none that I’m aware) to my present life) and are from things that happened in my every day life years or even decades ago…

I could be doing something… cleaning up my room, for example, and all of a sudden an episode from 25 or 30 years ago surfaces, which seems to be unrelated…

Just wanting to know if anyone else has experienced this and if it’s something I ought to be concerned about.

Yeah, but not from 25-30 years ago usually. Not that old… maybe 15-20 years ago for me

It drives me crazy, so I’m in the same boat with ya. I sometimes try to draw parallels to recent thoughts. Other times I adopt the mindset that I won’t understand why this popped into my head, but perhaps I will be able to associate this thought with something else and maybe eventually be able to think “aha! thats why it popped into my head.”

Whether or not to be concerned… best answer I got is “thats a frequency question”. How often and is it often enough to bother you?

Moved to P&M… I hope you don’t, er, mind? :slight_smile:

As the years go by the clutter that has accumulated in our childish minds makes way for more focused thoughts to arise, and perhaps the increasing void allows for these old memories to resurface to fill it, or be filled with thoughts that might not even be our own.

I think it’s a mistake to think and to base reason on the thought, that all things that happen in our mind are reasonable, rational, and part of a neat cause-and-effect global (to the mind) order.

While that may be true, it is also true that microscopic changes also affect the mind, which microscopic changes have no connection to the order of the mind’s world, but occur due to environmental changes; such as chemically (and not cognitively) induced firing of neurons, which have a cause, (chemical, not mental) and the effect is the upbringing of an unrelated memory.

Randomness happening in the mind is rampant, and creative types get more of it. The entire process of problem solving hinges upon randomly connecting or trying new connections, of explanation. If they are wrong, they get discarded; if they are right, they get reinforced and become a new pattern recognized by the mind.

So don’t expect that all memories are and need to be connected. They can and do pop up, because part of the survival tactic of the mind is to produce seemingly random connections (which need to be relaity-tested, but their force of usefulness is exactly their randomness.)