Events or experiences that are out of ordinary tend to be remembered better because there is nothing competing with them when your brain tries to access them from its storehouse of remembered events. In other words, the reason it can be difficult to remember what you ate for breakfast two Thursdays ago is that there was probably nothing special about that Thursday or that particular breakfast ― consequently, all your breakfast memories combine together into a sort of generic impression of a breakfast. Your memory merges similar events not only because it’s more efficient to do so, but also because this is fundamental to how we learn things ― our brains extract abstract rules that tie experiences together. This is especially true for things that are routine. If your breakfast is always the same ― cereal with milk, a glass of orange juice, and a cup of coffee for instance ― there is no easy way for your brain to extract the details from one particular breakfast. Ironically, then, for behaviors that are routinized, you can remember the generic content of the behavior (such as the things you ate, since you always eat the same thing), but particulars to that one instance can be very difficult to call up (such as the sound of a garbage truck going by or a bird that passed by your window) unless they were especially distinctive. On the other hand, if you did something unique that broke your routine― perhaps you had leftover pizza for breakfast and spilled tomato sauce on your dress shirt ― you are more likely to remember it.