Forgetting is part of our daily lives, and is usually seen as a sign of poor memory or a disease, but recent studies indicate that forgetting may play an important role in improving brain functions, and contribute to enhancing our ability to adapt to new information.
The “Live Science” website said in a report by writers Sven Vanstee and Elva Arulchelvan, that one of the oldest research in this field confirmed that forgetting may occur simply because memories fade, according to the findings of the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus in the 19th century, who showed the “curve of forgetting.” Who coined it that most people forget the details of new information very quickly.
But forgetting can also serve functional purposes. Our brains are constantly exposed to various information, and if we want to remember all the details, it will be difficult for us to retain important information.
One way to avoid forgetting important things is to not pay attention to those small details in the first place. Eric Kandel, the American neuroscientist who won the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 2000, points out that memories are formed when connections between neurons in the brain are strengthened.
Paying attention to something strengthens those connections and preserves memories, and this mechanism also enables us to forget all the unimportant details that we are exposed to every day.
Although indicators of lack of attention increase with age, we all need to forget unimportant details in order to form new memories, according to the authors.
Dealing with new information
The authors explained that retrieving memories may sometimes involve changes in how you deal with new information: Let us assume, for example, that your daily commute requires you to drive on the same road every day, so you likely remember the road well, as the basic brain connections associated with it are strengthened with each commute.
But let’s say your usual route is closed one day, and you have to take a new route for the next three weeks. Because your memory of the details of the trip must be flexible enough to integrate this new information, one of the methods the brain uses in this case is to weaken some memory connections related to the old route, while strengthening additional new connections to remember the new route.
Transient forgetfulness
The authors stated that forgetting may sometimes not occur due to memory loss, but rather due to changes in our ability to access memories, and research conducted on rodents has shown that forgotten memories can be retrieved or reactivated by supporting neural connections.
In humans, this is called “transient forgetting.” You may see someone on the street and you cannot remember his name, but as soon as you remember the first letter, you remember the entire name, and this is known as the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon.
American psychologists Roger Brown and David McNeil studied this phenomenon in the 1960s and concluded that people’s ability to identify the missing word with a little concentration was better than remembering it by chance, and this indicates that the information was not completely forgotten.
One theory indicates that this phenomenon occurs as a result of weak links in memory between words and their meanings, which leads to difficulty remembering the required information. Another possibility is that this phenomenon may be a sign that the information is not completely forgotten, but merely currently inaccessible.
This may explain why they occur more frequently as we age and memories accumulate, which means that the brain has to sort through more information to remember something. The “tip of the tongue” phenomenon may be confirmation that the required information is not forgotten, and that a little effort may help. To remember it successfully.
The authors concluded that humans may forget information and memories for several reasons, including lack of sufficient attention, or because the information fades over time, or because of the automatic memory sorting mechanism in the brain, and sometimes the forgotten information is not lost permanently, but rather becomes temporarily inaccessible, and all of these Forms of forgetting help our brains work efficiently.
But this does not apply to pathological conditions that cause complete loss of memories, such as Alzheimer’s disease.