What causes a memory to be deeply impacting in your life is if there's a lot of emotion with it. Take note of that because you're going to find this is an important thing when it comes to dealing with our inner life. When something you experience has a lot of emotion with it it actually is more deeply embedded in your memory than almost any other. If there's no emotion with it it isn't embedded in your memory very much, so for example you think of your first kiss - a lot of emotion with that. You remember when and where and how, just only one kiss but you remember it. It was impacting because there was a strong emotion came with it, so any experience you have which strongly affects your emotions will make a stronger impression, a stronger marking in your life. If you have a traumatic experience then what happens then is there's a huge imprint left inside your mind by the traumatic experience. The way God has wired your mind is it doesn't just go to one place, its spread all over the mind in different parts. That's what makes it sometimes hard to recall it and bring it back. It's spread out.
So the first thing is impressions; whatever experience, the impression it makes on you, if it's a deep impression you tend to remember it. If it's got feelings associated with it you'll remember it even more, so often you'll find you'll remember something, you'll hear something and then you'll remember something and then there's emotions come back to mind. Okay, so the first thing is impressions, so the deeper the impression an experience has on you, the more it's embedded in your mind, the less likely you are to forget it. If it's a major one and traumatic, then it'll embed deeply in your mind like a crack and a fracture. It'll be spread across the various parts of your mind and it's recorded there and it's just there - and it doesn't go away. It doesn't go away. It doesn't go away. The second thing to realise is the power of repetition, so God has designed us that if we repeat things what happens is it goes something like this.
If you drive a car along the same spot all the time you'll start to find there are ruts in the road. When we went to Rome we went down some of the roads in Rome or one of the other places, Pompey. In Pompey there's actually ruts where the chariots went. You can actually see the rut, so if you try and drive a chariot there it'll fit into the rut and then it'll just go down the rut. Once it's in the rut it's not easy to get it out. So what happens is with a memory, you have an experience. There's a track of neuron paths created within your brain, and then if you keep having that or you repeat it the same track is formed, formed, formed, formed, formed. It goes deeper and deeper and deeper, until in the end you've got now something embedded into your mind and you don't have to think about it any more. You just drop into the rut and away you go, for example, how many of you have found like for example you're driving to work. You drive to work every day and then you get in the car and start to point it that way, then before you know it you're there and you haven't even thought through how you got there? It's just like it's now become such a habit that you get in the rut and when you point in that direction something subconscious takes over. It's the imprinted memory, the rut and away you go.
I've even had it where I've meant to go somewhere else and I started heading towards the church and ended up going to the church, thinking what did I do that for? Because I was no longer conscious. It was unconscious, subconscious. Getting the idea? And so for example if things have no emotion with them you've got to repeat them to memorise them. Say for example you want to learn the times tables, you have to keep repeating them and you repeat them and you repeat them and you repeat them. Eventually, after repeating them enough it's just locked into your mind. It's like there's a mental rut, a neuron path deep enough to contain that thing and you just immediately have got it. Now this is all stuff, its simple stuff isn't it? But you have to understand how this operates, so we've got that, how we memorise things when we first of all have an experience, it forms a path in the mind and if you repeat the experience then the path goes deeper and deeper and deeper.