One thing that I often wonder about is the mechanism of the mind that makes a mental 'image', feeling, or memory pop back into the mind at a random moment.

For about a week, I would get a random memory of a non eventful moment back in the UK about 6 years ago... driving along an uneventful road, on the way to do something rather... uneventful.

Today, tapping away at my keyboard, a lovely memory of a summers day in the UK pops into mind. Again nothing special, just a nice view.

Duh Doh Duh... just remembered... this morning I trimmed the conifer trees in my garden... and an hour later, I have an image of a huge spruce tree in the UK, on a summers day...

Isn't it wierd that the mind is obviously processing information at so many levels, and sometimes things just bubble to the surface!?

Do they serve a purpose? - Like a compter program running away in parallel, trying to answer questions that may have been put to it...

as for the mental image of an uneventful car journey 6 years ago... I just don't know. Maybe I had an epiphany at that moment, I just can't rmemeber it... and why is my mind digging up this information... what purpose. As a biologist, I assume it is to improve my chances of survival, or at least reproduction... which of course these days goes beyond, fight or flight... hunt and gather... to civilised levels... hunt and gather money and skills, to procreate! etc..

I find it fascinating.

Anyone else have any theories?

Agreed, the human mind is an iteresting subject. I forget names almost as quickly as they are told to me, but for some strange reason I can remember a certain guy's name I knew in highschool ... and he wasn't even a friend.

I'm more of a visual person and relate better to pictures than words... unless they are nature sounds... or songs. I used to sing and it only took one chord and a whole flood of songs would come back to me and I'd remember all the lyrics.

If I take the time to condense and write something down I'll remember it. But, if someone just tells me something I quickly forget it.

Your brain is organic, chemical and electrical. Although your body has complex systems to regulate what chemicals go where ("chemicals" in this context can mean anything in your blood or system such as fat cells or vitamins, nutrients or drugs), it stands to reason that your diet (or whatever you ingest) can have an effect on what your brain does.

Psychoactive drugs are the most obvious example.......coffee is another example of something that affects your mind.....so why not anything you eat?

One small deficiency or overabundance here, and things go out of balance somewhere else, resulting in odd things happening.

Then of course there is the psi angle, for which I think the jury is still out, officially, although I personally would tend to support the idea of psi capabilities in humans.

Your brain is organic, chemical and electrical. Although your body has complex systems to regulate what chemicals go where ("chemicals" in this context can mean anything in your blood or system such as fat cells or vitamins, nutrients or drugs), it stands to reason that your diet (or whatever you ingest) can have an effect on what your brain does.

Psychoactive drugs are the most obvious example.......coffee is another example of something that affects your mind.....so why not anything you eat?

One small deficiency or overabundance here, and things go out of balance somewhere else, resulting in odd things happening.

Food can definitely mess with the head. Years ago I discovered that if I ate a couple gas station hot dogs covered in the cheapest can of chili con carne they had at the supermarket before going to bed I would have some crazy dreams.

So no correlation between flashback memories from years past and current events?

Why would a brain drag out mundane images of events years in the future...

I imagine when I am old, my days will be spent watching these internal movies as they randomly bubble to the surface...

I wonder if I kept a track of these old memories, if there would be a pattern... like my image of the spruce tree back in the UK, an hour after cutting some conifers here...

what purpose was there for my brain to present that image.. was it just bored, and dug away in its records for a conifer related memory... and chose the best of the bunch? but why? maybe there is a portion of the mind that does this non stop... a non stop reference/lookup service... "dont eat the red and purple berries"... or "watch out this looks like sabre tooth tiger turf"...

This makes sense for "danger" memories... but why bother with just pleasant or mundane memories, that have no apparent meaning...

And for some wierd reason I often get a memory snapshot of a supermarket parking lot in the UK, again about 6 years ago... a supermarket parking lot that I had only been to twice in my life!!

Maybe I need to defrag my brain cells...

I think that, psi aspect aside, you put your finger on it with the defrag analogy.

That's not to say you can defrag, just that it is probably a good analogy as to the root cause of random memories surfacing.

(Putting aside ingestion of subsatnces )