AI summary
Michelle Spear argues that the brain doesn’t “fill up”; what fails is attention and encoding, which matters now amid constant information overload.
The brain filters experience, selecting what to store based on attention, emotion, and hippocampal prioritisation.If attention is elsewhere, experiences are weakly encoded, so the “missing memory” was never properly formed.Memory is reconstructed on recall, not replayed, so shared events can diverge as reconstructions are reinforced differently.“Feeling full” reflects saturated processing limits: finite attention and very limited working memory, like too many tabs open.Computer analogies mislead: memories are distributed across neural networks, constantly reorganised, and altered by new experiences.The implication is to protect attention, and revisit what matters, if you want memories to stick—and to worry less about “storage” and more about retrieval and reinforcement.