I was sure I’ve come across this claim before, but google has been unhelpful. With Bing (!), I finally found this YouTube-short making the claim in the title, but well, that’s a less than reliable source.
So is there anything to this, or is this just something on the ‘we only use 10% of our brains’-level?
How would you even quantify this? The ability to accurately reproduce a movie of ever moment of what we’ve seen and heard? And how would you even measure how accurate such a movie is? If I can’t remember the color of the car that passed me on the road three weeks ago, is that a bigger or smaller error than not remembering the face of a person I met?
The problem with answering this is that people remember the past in various ways. Some people have hyperthymesia, which means that they can remember (more or less) what was happening to them and the world in general ever since a certain point in their lives. There are other people who can’t tell you specifically what they did yesterday. They have no problem though with their jobs, their life with their partners, and their memories of things they use all the time. There’s various other memory conditions which otherwise normal people have.
Think of just last year. Let’s just pick a date:
March 3rd. A Friday. Remember what you were doing? No?
Ok, now what about February 19? What happened to you? This was a Sunday. Anything specific come to mind?
What about your birthday? What was that like?
Was there maybe a day where there was a car accident, or you twisted your ankle, that you can pretty vividly describe?
Or maybe the day you first met your new girlfriend. That might have remained a memorable day. Or got fired. Or saw that celebrity who was in that movie about that thing.
Now, about how many of those sorts of days do you estimate you had last year?
And what about 5 years ago? What was your birthday like then? Any particularly memorable events happen? 10 year ago? 20?
I’d surmise that we really do “forget” (that is, fail to store in our long term memory) the vast, vast majority of our lives.
I can definitely believe 3%
An aside to this topic: there are apparently only about a hundred people on the planet who have a rare condition called highly superior autobiographical memory (HSAM), which allows them to recall almost every day of their lives in remarkable detail, including memories of when they were babies. One of them is actress Marilu Henner.
I agree with Chronos that quantifying what the question even means is necessary before it can be answered. 3% of what? Do we say that a person remembers 100% of a day if they can write a paragraph describing what happened on that day? Or do they need to remember every sensory detail that they experienced second-by-second for the whole day? If the latter is meant, I think 3% is a huge overestimate.
I phrased my OP poorly, so allow me to clarify: I’m not interested in whether the claim is plausible, or how it could have come about, but simply whether this is a claim that’s being made somewhere beyond that YouTube-short (and if so, where), or if I’m just misremembering.
I’m not finding it elsewhere, and the maker of that You Tube video is a right-wing pastor with questionable ideas.
Mark Batterson - Wikipedia. I wonder if the book he is reading it from is one of his own.
14 posts were merged into an existing topic: Do we remember only 3% of our lives? [discussion of “factoid”]
[Moderating]
Just a reminder that the topic of this thread is the origin of this specific factoid. If you just want to discuss memory in general, MPSIMS might be a better fit.
Fair enough. But I’m not sure this is really a factual question?
How might one quantify or investigate it?
And the OP seemed to include consideration of other ‘factoids’…
The OP has clarified in #7 that they are not asking whether the claim that we remember 3% is true or not, they are asking where that claim has been made. That is a straightforward factual question.
Yeah, I’m guilty of formulating this badly. I really wanted to know two things: is this something people have been saying? And if so, where does it come from?
The reference to the ‘10%’-thing was just as an example of something that’s being repeated a lot, but which doesn’t seem to have a clear origin.
Anyway, it doesn’t seem that this is something in wide circulation, and might in fact just be made up by that guy on YouTube. Either I’ve seen a reference to that short somewhere, or I just made the notion up myself and the short just accidentally happens to make the same claim.
Sorry, I probably wasn’t reading closely enough.
FWIW, as a data point, I have not seen that particular ‘factoid’ anywhere else.
There’s a Wikipedia entry about the best guesses for the origin of the 10% myth, as you can see in Ten-percent-of-the-brain myth - Wikipedia . It didn’t seem to start in one place. It seems to come from a gradual accumulation of various authors saying various things.
I really suspect he was using one of his own books as his source.
So changing the search terms to ‘forgetting’ rather than retaining information, I found some at least half-way plausible source, with this document reporting the claim that:
People forget 50-80% of what they’ve learned after one day and 97-98% after a month.
However, the URL cited there is no longer active. I was able to track it down on the Wayback Machine, where it is claimed (in the context of student exam prep) that after one hour of studying, “by Day 30, we retain about 2%-3% of the original hour”.
The whole thing seems to originate with the so-called ‘forgetting curve’ created mainly by a guy called Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 1880s testing himself for retention of list-based data of nonsense syllables. And while that was apparently mostly reproduced in 2015 in a study with one subject, generalizing from there to a claim like ‘we only retain 3% of our memories’ or something of that sort has more issues than are worth listing.
It also seems to be something mainly trotted out among the consultant crowd in regard to employee training, so make of that what you will.
Anyway, I think this is as close as I can get to a plausible origin for the factoid.
There’s also the issue of whether information retained only unconsciously “counts” as “remembering”; the data is there, but even if the person recalls it they won’t know it. People have been known to “just make things up” and only later discover they were unknowingly more-or-less repeating something they’d encountered or read of many years ago.
And then there’s the issue of how inaccurate human memory can be; how wrong does a memory have to be before not counting as remembering? And how would be even find out? It’s not like we’re recorded 24/7, so a lot of our personal memory is going to be uncheckable . Then there’s also the question of non-narrative memory; what “percent of your life” does recalling facts like your first gaming console or the name of a childhood pet count as.
I have to agree that it’s just not practical to quantify the question. But lots of people like precise numbers, which I suspect it the origin of the “factoid”; somebody attaching a percentage to the issue because they liked the sound of it. Googling, I find multiple similar “factoids” giving different numbers.
Moderator Note
I have removed most of the posts in this thread that discuss memory and the factoid itself. Those posts may now be found in the MPSIMS thread here:
Please use the MPSIMS thread for discussion of memory issues and the validity of the factoid itself, and keep this discussion if FQ focused on the origin of the factoid.