I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associati

I agree with you entirely. I want to make a few points though. First is that even when I am actively listening to someone speaking, my brain will make associations with the new information (coming from my auditory sensory registers), so I context-switch involuntarily every second. Think of process preemption. Roughly like this: t0: hear the word "dog"; my auditory registers record it t1: my brain processes the word "dog"; I imagine what "dog" looks like hear the word "cat" concurrently, goes into registers t2: my brain processes the word "cat" I imagine what "cat" looks like hear the word "lamb" concurrently, goes into registers This works all thanks to the fact our auditory sensory registers can withhold information longer than visual's (and the reason why we tend to forget what we see). > if they simply provide opportunity to think more about material, which would obviously give an advantage as compared to the people in the studies "controls" that have to learn new information. The second point I want to make is eyewitness testimony and memory biases. Given enough time, a witness can tell untruth. There is a limit to how long we can keep the "truth" in our brain. Long-term memory is not a perfect storage system. Without rote rehearsal, our memories will decay. During our sleep, some believe (at least this is how I was taught in my class) that the brain will do "garbage collection", basically removing things the brain don't think is important. Onto the third and the last point. Our brain can develop by forming new neurons (or undevelop skills by killing neurons). When a person becomes deaf after an accident, then his/her speech ability will lose over time. Thanks to our neuroplasticity, we can reverse the change by learning again, though we may not recover 100%. This is happening to me: some of my cognitive functions have stopped functioning well after an accident last summer, I have been trying hard to recover, even though there are some improvements, I don't know how much can recover. In general, I am impaired and disabled. I just started my neuroscience studies, so I recommend reading on dendrite spines. They are "cute" and play vital role involving memory. * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLrozoinuM * https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm012114.php https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2014-01/aeco-wmm0121... * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X15000859 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0018506X1...