Remembering the days of your life, Part 1

Imagine if you could board a time machine and go back to any day of your life. It could be ten years ago, it could be twenty-five years ago . . . just any random day. Imagine further that you could re-live that day with yourself, observing from a distance everything that happened to you, from the time that you woke up in the morning until the time you set your tired head upon the pillow at night. You could see once again (but not change!) everything that happened to you on that day.

My question is this: For any given day in your past (starting at about the age of five or six, when the human is capable of remembering things), would there be at least one thing that happened that day that you specifically remember? One specific event? One conversation? One thought? Or, are there days in our lives that contain no specific, discernable memories?

Now, you may or may not have thought about this question before, and you may or may not think it is an interesting one. But, in the spirit of confessing my innermost thoughts on the internet for anyone to see, I will say that this is a question that has fascinated me for at least twenty years. I often find myself pondering whether or not, given the chance to replay, say, April 10, 1974, I would say at least one time, “Ah, yes, I specifically remember that!”

The great thing about hypothetical questions is that everyone can give hypothetical answers, and (at least in situations such as this) nobody is wrong. But having contemplated this question for a few decades now (and, by the way, this is the first time I have ever told anyone about this), here is what I think:

I believe that if I could replay every day of my life, in almost all cases (probably more than 95%), I would indeed be able to recall at least one specific memory from that day—a joke that someone told, something a teacher said, a conversation, a fight with one of my sisters (wait, that never happened!), a baseball game, etc. But I do think that there are a very small percentage of days, most of which would be from my early childhood, where I really could not honestly recall one thing. I think I would certainly recall some “constants” of my life during the time periods in question—the wart on my finger, the dent in the back of the Station Wagon, the way that the dog acted when she needed to be let outside, etc. But I would not necessarily remember a specific memory that happened only on that day.

So in the majority of the “days of my life,” I think I could recall a specific memory. But whenever I start to feel confident about this answer, I begin to wonder if I am wrong. Maybe there are more days than I care to admit that have forever become black holes, where, even if I could see a replay of the whole day, nothing would jump out as memorable. Maybe I would only be able to recall a specific memory from 75% of the days of my life, or maybe 50%. But I rather think that there is more information (including specific memories) packed into our brains than we tend to think, which drives me back to my original conclusion.

Indeed my uncertainty over this is what has led me to ponder it for so long. What do you think? (To be continued . . .)