Why is it so easy to remember useless trash from some tv show in 1987 but so difficult to remember a friend’s new cellphone number? What does that say about the human brain?

It isn’t that we don’t want to remember important things, most of us work hard to do so. But it seems so much easier to remember trivia, a funny line from a movie, the brand of cereal we like best, or a discontinued flavor of ice cream we liked when we were 5 than any of the important stuff we are really supposed to commit to memory. Is it our brains subtle way of boycotting? Maybe we don’t want to be bothered with remembering important work projects and doctor appointments so our brain just dumps them in the trash and replaces the space with a song from an episode of 90210. Why do I remember that Losing my Religion was playing the first time Brenda and Dylan broke up? I don’t need to know that, yet in some weird way I am kind of glad I do.

I guess memory kind of plays games with us. Sometimes it holds on to things we wish it wouldn’t, it often trashes things we need to keep but also stores away fun, whimsical things we might not know we need until we remember it and smile.

The smell of a crisp fall day when we were 8, one eloquent line from a song that was playing when something good happened, the sound of the rain pounding down on the window during a dark moment, all these things float through our memories reminding us of where we have been and hopefully where we might end up.

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