Mormon paused his record to make a sad observation about human nature. People forget God fastest in their easiest seasons. The pattern he described, prosperity giving way to forgetting and pride, runs all through the Book of Mormon, and the science of memory shows why comfort is so corrosive to remembrance.

Cognitive neuroscientist Charan Ranganath, in his 2024 book Why We Remember, describes two forces that decide whether a memory stays vivid. The first is rehearsal: a memory returned to often stays sharp, while a memory left untouched fades. The second is significance: the brain holds tightly to what feels surprising, emotional, and consequential, and lets the routine slip past with barely a trace. Put those together and a hard truth follows. When life turns smooth and safe, the very conditions that fix memory begin to disappear. The stakes drop. The surprises stop. There is less that demands to be remembered, and so we remember less.

Hardship, for all its pain, keeps memory awake. A people who depend on God for the next meal rehearse his help daily and feel the stakes in their bones. Give that same people a generation of plenty, and the daily rehearsal stops, the felt need fades, and the memory of dependence grows thin without anyone deciding to let it go.

Researchers see this in ordinary memory too. The events that stay vivid are the ones that broke the pattern, the surprises and the shocks, while long stretches of comfortable sameness blur into almost nothing. Ease is forgettable by design. A year of contentment leaves fewer marks on memory than a single hard week, which is a mercy for the sufferer and a danger for the comfortable.