It's a classic pattern. You remember the name of your kindergarten teacher, but you can't remember the plot of the movie you saw last night.
Researchers believe they can partly explain why.
They have identified the areas of the brain that become more active when we remember. In a unique pair of studies conducted in 1998, scientists at Harvard and Stanford universities used sophisticated imaging techniques to watch people's neural activity and, for the first time, show which parts of the brain determine whether a specific experience will be remembered or forgotten. That discovery means advertisers might one day figure out how to make commercials better stick inside the consumer brain. They want their stuff to be tied into your brain. So, if someone wanted to see what type of material might activate this region more than another region, that could be something applied to education or advertising.