Memory is impossible without forgetting

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.