This popped into my mind the other day, and I’ve been distracted by it since… You know when you’re trying to recall something, and a wrong answer pops into your head, but you know it’s wrong. Like how does that work? E.g. if you’re trying to remember who made a song, and your brain can almost simultaneously go - oh it’s that band, and then oh no not them. It feels like there has to be two (at least) parts of the brain working on it at the same time.
Maybe I’ll be lucky and a neuroscientist will drop in and link me to a paper. More likely it’s something to discuss with wild speculation. Either way, I’m hoping writing it down will stop it distracting me.
Heuristic processing, determination based on induction rather than certainty.
let’s use “on the roof again” by as an example, a 90s pop punk song.
ask your brain “who made this song?”
very rapidly it goes
music people!
not all music people.
and discards bands who definitely don’t sound like it: instrumental bands, classical music, slower love ballads, female singers (since the lead singer is a male in this case).
and now there’s a way smaller pool to choose from, so your brain keeps going, matching broad strokes to the broad strokes you remember from the song you’re thinking of, until one band sticks out as the most likely candidate, and usually at the end you can stick that determination to a specific memory you have of looking at the album cover while you listen to the song, or some concrete moment in which a line struck you and that more concrete memory helps confirm your final answer.
this is also why people can remember things “for sure” that turn out to be incorrect, because they’ve gone through the heuristic process and determined a most likely answer that may not be correct, because it takes much less processing power and time to heuristically determine an answer rather than specifically determining it answer, and heuristic processing does work well most of the time.