[randomvectors]

> The brain doesn't know to overlap memories by some hidden timestamp of oh these both happened at the same time!

It kind of does. Each time you recollect something you change the memory of the event (this is also mentioned in the article). Repeated recollection can have varied effects from (simplified) "I don't recall the original event, I recall the last time I thought of it" all the way up to creating false memories. I think there's been quite a bit of research on how this relates to interrogation techniques and the reliability of eyewitness testimony.

[marktangotango]

I caused a car accident 25 years ago when I drove through a stop sign and was hit in the side by another car. Other than being rattled quite hard I suffered no ill effects although it totalled both my car and the car that hit me. I'd driven that same route several times over the past year, I had just been in a daze or something on that occassion.

I spent a few days recuperating at home, sore as hell. During that time I replayed the incident several times in my head, and thought I had a clear idea of the stop sign I missed and what it looked like. I went back later, and the intersection was nothing like I had convinced myself I had remembered it being. Specifically I'd convinced myself the stop sign was partially obscured, and it wasn't.

This experience shook me for a long time, and gave me a deep distrust of my own memories. There's a reason why eye witness aren't entirely reliable, I'd experienced it myself.

[NikkiA]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automaticity

[mamon]

I think this is because our memories are not videos, we do not store them pixel by pixel, because that would require huge amount of storage space our brains do not have. Instead we use the approach similar to 3d games: remember rough shape of an object as one piece of information, location as second piece, and color or texture as a third. When recalling a memory your brain renders the whole scene, and if some piece of infomation is missing it makes it up on the fly to fill the gap. Then you overwrite your original memory with memory of this most recent rendering.