Remember this: Forgetting has its benefits
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BY MELINDA BECK / The Wall Street Journal
There’s an old saying that inside every 70-year-old is a 35-year-old wondering, “What happened?”
What happened is that countless days, nights, meetings, commutes and other unremarkable events went by, well, unremarked. They didn’t make a lasting impression on the brain or they were overwritten by so many similar experiences that they are hard to retrieve. In short, they’ve been forgotten.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Neuroscientists say forgetting is crucial to the efficient functioning of the mind, to learning, adapting and recalling more significant things.
What if you want to remember more about each passing day? One simple method: Keep a journal. Writing down a few thoughts and events every day not only makes a tangible record, it also requires you to reflect. "You're elaborating on why they were meaningful, and you're laying down an additional memory trace," says neuroscientist James McGaugh at UC Irvine. Taking photographs and labeling them reinforce memories too.
Forgetting and finals week
Our brains intentionally forget stuff. They prioritize what's useful or significant and repeatedly cultivate our overcrowded pools of data.
Forgetting, like a good colon cleanse, is beneficial to our well-being.
This rather counterintuitive notion got me thinking about college. Particularly finals week - a little more than a week away - in which students cram as much into their gray matter as possible, only to take a test on the info and then forget most of it as soon as the final bubble is filled in (or before then).
Being a product of a liberal arts education, I recall long hours of studying for my Intro to Geology final, but all of that knowledge has faded. About all I remember from that class is that sometimes earthquakes happen.
"I don't make an effort to NOT hold onto the information, but there's just so much of it that it's hard to hold on to the really minute details," said Matt Anderson, 21, a finance major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He said there's no way a guy can memorize and retain ALL of those accounting class formulas.
He thinks he'll remember most of the fundamentals five years from now when he's hopefully well into his career. But the small, agonizing details that are so important right now will probably be "a hazy recollection, nothing really deep."
UNL juniors Amanda Harriman and Meghan McDonough, both 20, said they expect to remember some of the stuff they studied in college, but it will probably be random and unexpected.
"But verbatim memory would be totally useless," McDonough said.
"I think I'd be out of my mind if I remembered everything from biology," Harriman said.
Is the anxiety of cramming for finals really worth it if we'll inevitably lose so much of it?
I posed this question to Mike Dodd, who teaches a class called Intro to Cognition at UNL. A third of his class focuses on memory, teaching the students about the importance of forgetting.
"It's actually really necessary (to forget)," he tells his students, "because our memory to a degree has a limited capacity."
Dodd issues multiple-choice finals to his class, perhaps the most forgettable of tests. However, he noted, the information you learn is often less important than the act of learning it.
"There's a selection process to studying," he said. "You have to realize what's important and what's not important. You try to connect what you learn to other things you know."
There's a difference between memorizing and learning. Memory fades, but "education" hopefully stays with you.
We'll have to keep that in mind.
- Micah Mertes
“We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned,” says Gayatri Devi, a neuropsychiatrist and memory expert in New York City. “But if you didn’t forget, you’d recall all kinds of extraneous information from your life that would drown you in a sea of inefficiency.“
That was what prompted Jill Price to contact the memory experts at the University of California at Irvine in 2000. As she wrote in a book published this summer, “The Woman Who Can’t Forget,” Price could recall in detail virtually every day since she was 14, but she was mentally exhausted and tormented by her memories.
Memories of singular, significant events — say, our recent historic election — are generally easy to recall; people typically store them in long-term memory with many associations attached.
Memories of mundane, recurring events compete to be recalled, and scientists say the brain appears to be programmed to forget those that aren’t important. Neuroimaging studies show that it’s the brain’s prefrontal cortex, the area of complex thought and executive planning, that sorts and retrieves such “like-kind” memories. Researchers at Stanford University’s Memory Laboratory demonstrated last year that the more subjects forgot competing memories, the less work their cortexes had to do to recall a specific one. In short, forgetting frees up brain power for other tasks, says psychologist Anthony Wagner, the lab’s director.
A real-world example, he says, is having to learn a new computer password every few months: As your brain suppresses the memory of the old password, it gets easier to summon the new one.
In fact, forgetting is a very active process, albeit subconscious, neuroscientists say. The mind is constantly evaluating, editing and sorting information, all at lightning speed. “Your brain is only taking a small amount in, and it’s already erasing vast amounts that won’t be needed again,” Devi says.
Much that happens during the day doesn’t make an impression at all because our attention is focused elsewhere. Take your daily commute, Wagner says: “A heck of a lot of stuff is landing on our retinas as we’re driving down the road. But if you were focusing on the presentation you have to give, you didn’t perceive it and it didn’t get stored.”
Are memories for events you didn’t focus on stored in your brain nevertheless — like unwatched bank-surveillance tapes? That’s an area of much debate. Some experts believe hypnosis can trigger long-buried associations. But so-called recovered memories are also susceptible to distortion.
“Memory consists of billions of puzzle pieces, and many of them look the same,” Devi says. “Each time you retrieve a memory, you’re reconstructing a puzzle very quickly and breaking it down again. Some of the pieces get put back in different places.”
You can take steps to try to improve your memory, but remember that forgetting can be very useful, says James McGaugh, a UC Irvine neuroscientist: “If you used to go out with Bob and now you’re married to Bill, you want to be able to say, ‘I love you, Bill.’ That’s why forgetting is important.”
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Dash wrote on December 6, 2008 3:35 pm: