Memory is impossible without forgetting
Mickey Mellen
Partner at GreenMellen | Website Developer | Speaker | Technology Enthusiast
It’s something I’ve not really thought about before, but the ability to hold memories is essentially impossible without forgetting. From a great post on Medium, Hallel shares some interesting thoughts on how forgetting helps with memory.
In short, they say:
“Your brain forgets unimportant details and retains what you present to it as important.”
Remembering what color shirt the bank teller was wearing last week is of no value, so your brain does a good job for forgetting it for you.
Further, they quite Oliver Hardt who says:
“What is memory without forgetting? It’s impossible. To have proper memory function, you have to have forgetting.”
Never forgetting is a problem
There are a few rare people in the world that can remember literally every detail of their lives. It’s an amazing gift, but it’s also a curse. They can put themselves back into any moment from their lives, but that means that they can’t shake any horrible memories that they’d like to suppress (such as the death of a loved one). This article from the BBC in 2016 digs into that quite a bit more.
How to remember
While forgetting can be a good thing, we’ve all faced many times where we forgot something that we specifically wanted to remember. There are no perfect solutions, but there are two things that can help.
The first is to set up memory palaces (or use similar memory techniques) to put things into your brain in a way that you’re more likely to remember. This takes some work, but can be a great way to get your brain to remember things that might have otherwise slipped out.
On top of that you can layer tools like Anki to resurface old memories at the right time. I’ve been using it daily for years and it’s an amazing (and simple) bit of technology that really makes a difference.
In the end, both of those systems require that you are intentional about wanting to remember something, which is the key to all of those. Your brain is going to forget things, by design, so you need to do a bit of intentional work to keep the right stuff in there.