At one of my courses today, someone asked me if everything is stored subconsciously in our memory.

Before I answer, let us first see how the memory of a squirrel works. The squirrel finds a nut and digs it down. Then winter arrives, and the squirrel is dependent to remember where the nut lies (down there, under the snow). For the squirrel, it is essential for its survival to remember where the nut lies.

But if the squirrel had remembered where all the nuts from the last years were buried, this would have created problems to find the nuts of the fall.

In some way, this can be compared to humans. If we still remembered where we parked our car every day for the past couple of years, this would have created problems to find out where we parked our car today. Both squirrels and humans are created to forget a lot. Therefore, my opinion is that “everything is stored subconsciously”, is a myth. We often experience this in the World Memory Championship. No one there can remember everything (then it wouldn´t have been any point of arranging a memory contest). Also here we are supposed to remember enormous amounts of digits, decks, figures and totally unnecessary things. For instance, no participant in World Memory Championships can remember the numbers we were given in “spoken numbers” in 2004. Unless they have repeated it. And then we are talking about consciously repeating, not unconsciously.