[westcoast49]

We attach our early memories to our concept of the world as it was then. Afterwards, our concept of the world changes. As a result, those old memories sort of become dangling pointers. They refer to a world model that no longer exists in our minds.

[baggy_trough]

Yes, it's like not being able to remember your dreams, or things when you're too drunk.

[jraph]

> it's like not being able to remember your dreams

That's just aggressive garbage collection happening when you wake up, arguably so you don't risk confusing dreams and reality :-)

But you can somewhat partially work around it by taking notes right after waking up, before doing anything else.

[momento]

You know you're on HN when people refer to neurology in terms of pointers and garbage collection.

[jraph]

Yep. Of course, one needs to adapt the speech to the audience :-)

[randcraw]

And as an infant our world was incredibly smaller than our world is now. Surely the 'principal components' of that day were reshaped or subsumed by other pointers later, thereby shifting the landmarks used to retrieve memories.

I would hazard a guess that the original pointers aren't revised to point nowhere, but are, if possible, moved to point into the revised reference model. (Presumably we do this now when we learn a new domain like music, and as the model for harmony becomes more concrete, our original pointers to elements within it are adjusted rather than lost.)

[westcoast49]

I think it happens to a certain extent, if we do as the article says, and revisit our memories. We then probably reinterpret our memories in the context of our new and updated understanding of the world.

In other cases I believe it’s quite possible that our understanding of the world, say at age two, is so radically different from our adult understanding, that the old memories don’t even make any sense in the new context. They can’t be remapped in any meaningful manner.