Have you ever noticed that in Star Trek everyone has amazing memories? “Oh, right, I remember reading this report once fifteen years ago that will save the day here.”
I’m not even talking about aliens where this could be common. (E.g. Spock’s encyclopedic knowledge about Earth history. Let’s say Vulcans have great memories and he studied carefully before joining Starfleet.) Humans do it all the time. Are these people all pounding the ginseng supplements or something? I genuinely want to know how human memory has gotten so amazing in a few hundred years.
I have a couple headcanons that could explain this: (1) augmentations prior to the Eugenics Wars, and (2) not having the stresses that we have today.
1. Humans benefited from a lot of genetic engineering (i.e., removing certain genetic diseases, like Parkinson’s and Huntington’s, etc.) and part of that was increasing memory which could have merely been a routine procedure until the complete banning of genetic manipulation. But by then the majority of the population had already had those particular augmentations and so would be able to pass that enhanced genetics onto their children, to the point where that particular method was deemed “normal’ as opposed to what was done to Julian Bashir, which would have benefited from 200 years of advanced medicine not present prior to the Eugenics Wars.
2. Another possibility is that because the Federation ends up not having to worry about things like healthcare, food scarcity, and lack of housing, people are able to more fully devote their mental energy to actually remembering things and absorbing things.
