Memory that I absolutely remember is first day of my high school and how I made my friends one the other hand by some reasons, I can’t remember first day of my elementary and middle school and how I got close with friends at that time until now. It may be because I have bad memory or my brain thinking it is useless to think about it for another reason is my life is too busy enough to get time to go look back.
First reason for why adult can’t remember their past is most of humans brains are not well developed to memorize everything by seeing things only once. According to result of experiment, when people see words, they memorized 100% in a moment. But by time passes, the percentage of words that they memorized decreases. 1 day later they for about 77% of words and finally when 31 days passed, only 21% words have left over in their brain which is really low. These results telling that if we don’t review, we can easily forget things. I had a same experience. I was needed to memorize 100 words at academy I started with fine condition so I finished early but next day, I had a strange experience about losing memories.
Secondly, brain doesn’t remember every single thing that we see. If it does, that person should be a genius who all countries want to have. Unfortunately I’m not a genius like that I’m a regular person like others-actually I’m not sure that if I’m normal. As I mentioned above, if we don’t see things with focus or not review it, we will not be able to remember whole things unless you are a genius who can memorize whole thing by seeing thing once. Therefore, normal people’s brains can’t memorize every single thing that happened long time ago unless you write diary on a note with a lock on it every end of the day and read it.
Lastly, adults don’t have spare time to look through their past especially in Korea. Students in High school study about 15 hours a day to prepare their test for College. After they graduate high school, they need to prepare for their job. After they got a job, they need to work for whole day. Therefore, they have no time to think about their past. And I don’t think anyone wants to spend their time on that. I think they would work if they have time to waste time on thinking useless thing.
Therefore it is useless and wasting of time to past that can’t go back. I’m not saying looking back on the past is bad but some people thinking that they would work rather than wasting time. Well some people may think that old memories are the most valuable thing in people’s life like a guy I know in my school who saves all the videos and works forever. There is a saying that frog can’t remember their tadpole time. As it means, adults can’t remember what they did wrong at young age.
I like the way that you put a result of an experiment as one of your examples. I also had an experience of forgetting every vocabularies that I memorized the following morning. However, I don’t agree to your opinion that looking back at the past is a waste of time, since you can learn a lot of things from the past.
It is really true that our brain can’t remember every single thing that happens. The part that in high school Korean’s study for 15 hours and even after college, people prepare to get a job, I guess this is the reality of Korean’s life to always become better than someone.
I also had similar experience with your experience, except it was worse than yours. Whenever I memorize vocabularies for English and History, I forget them completely after few days. Some people, including you may say that thinking back about your past is wasting your time. However, in my opinion, I think thinking back about the past helps a person to think in many different ways. For example, when you get into the situation that is really similar to your past, you have an opportunity to get the better result, since you may try different action than your past.
I’ve also experienced that I couldn’t remember all the things that happened to me when I thought that I did. I read my diary which I wrote when I was 15, and read a lot of things that I did or had happened to me that I didn’t remember.