system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5:What is going on in your brain while trying to remember something that you just can't seem to?
gpt
When you remember something, your brain isn't actually accessing the original event, it's accessing the memory of the last time you accessed the event. So the more often you access it, the more iterations there are to go through. You're meta-processing. You are aware that you have remembered it before, but you cannot unlock the content of the original memory.

Think of it as telling a story. The first time, you get eh story straight from some book. But then you tell it from memory. And then you tell it from the memory of the last time you told it, because that's much more efficient then re-translating the story. You never forget that at one point you read the book, but eventually you forget exactly what it said. When you actively try to remember something, your brain is trying to process all the way beck to the actual reading of the book, which is much harder.