‘The advantage of a bad memory is that one enjoys several times the same good things for the first time.’ — Nietzsche
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.
“We focus so much on memory that forgetting has been maligned,” says Gayatri Devi, a neuro-psychiatrist 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.” (…)
Memories of singular, significant events — say, last week’s 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.
photo { Thobias Fäldt }
November 25th, 2008 at 3:37 am
Michael Pollan discusses the need for or advantage of forgetting in the context of marijuana use in The Botany of Desire. He asserts that Marijuana’s affect on the short term memory is the most dynamic and important aspect of the experience, rather than the seratonin levels. Being high is experiencing sensual reality and mental process as if for the first time, which allows you to drop such mental baggage as past experience and expectations. Once immediate experience bypasses that specific screen, everything is intensified. Anyway, hooray for forgetting.
November 25th, 2008 at 3:41 am
By the way, I am not certain that Pollan is the first to make this observation about marijuana. That’s the only place I’ve encountered the notion so thoroughly discussed, which is why I mentioned it.