Why do humans have such short memories?

I find it fascinating that, at least in American society, people are phased by things for a couple months then people seem to ignore it or put it on the back burner.

For example, just ten years ago two planes crashed into the world trade center. Thousands died. Many burned to death. Today this is a mere memory that has faded into the public's subconsious.

Why don't people care anymore? People cared on September 11, 2001.

What about the Haiti earthquakes? What about the Japan nuclear problem?

What about the Cuban Missile Crisis? We almost entered nuclear war there.

Moving a little further back, what about WW 2? There are still veterans from that. Who knows what would have happened if we lost.

What about WW 1? It was the biggest war in history! It was to be "the war to end all wars"! Europe was covered with barbwire, machine guns, and mustard gas. Millions died.

There are countless catastrophes EVERYONE should know about, especially with the arrival of internet and schools.

I'm shocked that people don't realize just how close we've been to being wiped out or history taking a drasticlly different course.

It just amazes me how cultures just forget. Why? How is it we forget things like this?

We didn't forget. It's just that it happened in the past, and we don't need to constantly worry about it.

There are far too many historical events to count. And we can't just look at the big ones with lots of casualties. There are smaller events happening in everyday lives.

Because what is a living, vivid memory for one generation is a few dozen oral tradition stories for the next, and a few paragraphs in the history textbooks for the one after that.

Also, World War Two was the largest war in history, not World War One.

There's a number of factors, but mainly it ties into immigration.

A lot of people fled Europe for the U.S. to get away from the conflicts that waged there (fun fact I remember reading somewhere: prior to 1950, no more than 20-25 years passed in Europe without war breaking out somewhere). These conflicts had a nasty tendency to arise to some degree from historical grudges, so a lot of the immigrants coming into the U.S. wanted to avoid that.

This tied into the whole American dream bit, and so the country developed a "look to the future, don't think about the past" mentality as a cultural norm. Like all cultural norms, this has some benefits and some downfalls.

This norm has weakened somewhat recently, particularly in certain areas of the country. Still, it's one of the main forces that influences American society and politics, and causes a metric ton of Values Dissonance on all sides.

Permian–Triassic extinction event here. Quakes and wars are small-time.

Not so much worry as aware. Most people act like they've never heard of things like that until the subject is brought up.

As for which war is bigger, I'm not getting into that in this thread.

Most people are not willingly apathetic to those constant tragedies and deaths, most people are simply unaware of them. Also, I would say that by far most of the world's seven billion inhabitants individually lacks the ability to do anything about it. What do you think agricultural science is for if not to fix hunger? What is medicinal science for if not to cure disease? What is the goal of civilization if not to end poverty?

We haven't found a way to stop the deaths yet, but every day we just might be getting a little bit closer, and someday we will fix the problem and stop the deaths. For that is our destiny and birthright as humans.

Because historical facts and statistics aren't very relevant to people's day-to-day lives?

The human brain is not built to be capable of feeling sorrow for each of those people individually.

I apologize if that sounds callous, but it's how it is. The time is better spent trying to figure out how to end that sort of thing.

Yes, allow me to not get mopey as shit over the number of deaths I can't possibly prevent now and instead walk ahead, understanding that I should put my future efforts to making it possible to stop or lessen such things.

edited 19th Oct '11 5:44:14 PM by Ramus

Because if you spent all day worrying or feeling sorrow about that sort of thing you'd be too fucking depressed to do anything at all.

Plus, most of us don't have the power to do anything about it. We can send some money their way or sign a petition or such, but the resources needed to fix those problems is usually bigger than one person trying to earn a paycheck and keep the bills paid.

edited 19th Oct '11 5:48:14 PM by Jeysie

I haven't forgotten, but what am I supposed to do about those things? Go back in time and stop them. Also let's face it, I have to live too. I can't give up my life to help others and neglect myself. That's setting up for failure.

The Topic is memory, people, not wars, not the number of deaths

@ OP: It's not an issue of memory. It's that there's no point in feeling sad about everything bad that happens. As others have pointed out, people die so often that it would be impossible to mourn them all and still function in society.

I agree with the "there's no sense in crying over spilt milk" sentiment. Also, maybe people do remember the past, but they figure they'd be better off not bringing it up again, so they pretend not to remember, or just don't talk about it.

Also, it might go back to when we were still living in the wild. If you spent all your time worrying about how Ug got eaten by a tiger or how Og got trampled by an angry mastodon, you'd be too exhausted to run from the next hungry tiger or angry mastodon and you wouldn't live to perpetuate your own genetic line. And if everyone did this, the human race might not have survived.

edited 20th Oct '11 1:24:25 PM by NomadicLurker

I think the bigger question is, who says we have short memories?

We haven't forgotten about World War II, or World War I, or the Cuban Missile Crisis, or any other major events in the past like that. We teach them in schools as part of our textbooks. Godwin's Law is still a very common logical fallacy where something is compared to Hitler, I'd say it's hard to argue that we've "forgotten" about that. Some things, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, are taught less than other things, but that's because, while significant, they were rather short and caused less loss of life than other events which we also focus on.

As for more recent event like 9/11, Haiti, and Japan, we talked about them the most when the situation was at its worst. Haiti is in the process of rebuilding, Japan is making a healthy recovery, 9/11 was discussed on the 10 year anniversary but al Qaeda is much less of a threat now and there's no real reason to continue discussing it. We still know it exists, we haven't forgotten, but we just don't need the memories of it right now because there are more pressing issues, so we don't access the memories until we need them.

In fact, I would argue that we have the opposite of short memories. We have the longest memory of any species, because while elephants never forget, they don't record their memories to teach other elephants about what happened. We "remember" Napoleon, the American Revolution, the Black Plague, Sir Isaac Newton, and a thousand other things through the use of education.

I think the bigger question is, who says we have short memories?

edited 20th Oct '11 2:54:58 PM by TonyMuhplaah