Memory at the MTR

Often in life we see a scene, say at the MTR, with thousands of input- somebody scratching their nose, kids playing on their phone, aunties discussing about their latest purchase, someone itching for a smoke, kids sucking their thumb, people trying to struggle and jostle for space without touching each other and very once in a while something especially memorable- a middle aged lady trying to sneak a picture of you on her phone.

I would probably forget most of these experiences as soon as I exit the station. Maybe I remember the sneaky lady because I talk about it to my friend in the evening. But if I say I forgot about this, then how am I able to describe such a scene in great detail to you? It is simply a patchwork stitching together of various scenes from memory due to a mental framework being created of the MTR in my head. Each journey I take on the MTR just adds a little bit more flesh to my model. If I exit through a station I have never seen before but it sort of vaguely looks like one I have been to before, my brain would simply copy the general frame of the known train station onto this one and then slowly tweak over smaller details as and when you see them. 

Very few experiences are truly new in the sense that you cannot drop over an existing frame for something similar onto them. For someone living in a city, If they have visited the main central attractions for each district and been to a few (randomly chosen) back alleys, they can quite vividly describe a model of the city with almost no easy to spot errors. 

The information we take in can either be going deeper into a topic or going broader. The issue comes when our knowledge is patchy, ie we know something but only bits and pieces. If information seems randomized in storage, it is harder to recall. Thus I reckon all information we put in the brain gets automatically stored in a folder, same as in a computer. But if you have ever worked with computers, you would immediately realise that storage is almost never an issue- the appropriate location for storage is.
If you learn tons of one-sentence fun facts in a book, you may feel you learnt a lot, but later, maybe a few years later, realize that you forgot, or more likely struggle to quickly recollect most of them.
But in most practical cases, nobody is going to be quizzing you specifically on randomized facts. It is more likely that you would need to pull in that you will face a situation that seems to be an eerily similar variation of what was described in the book, and you then try to use your "intuition" to figure it out.

It is thus super easy for the mind to create a frame and thus a narrative in your head, the pattern-seeking behaviour is especially suited for getting a feel of the area quickly and later add more details. But it can also come back to bite you when a random event happens i.e., you exit the MTR and there is quite simply no station there. What would you do in the case of the black swan event ?

The concept of the narrative is especially strong in fields that need to capture attention, such as marketing, news and politics. The narrative can be taken any way for the same event. Rising tensions can be attributed to different factors and each major factor can be delved into deeply. It is much better to sell ‘War maybe lost due to faulty ammunitions bought from corrupt company’ than simply stating ‘Variety of parameters make any prediction impossible’. Maybe after the War is lost, we can look back at the article to prove that yes this was it, or after it is won it can be said we almost lost because of this or you could simply forget about it and instead look at the other millions of articles published in that time period.