The benefits of forgetting

hildren sometimes seem to have better memories than adults. A young child may clearly remember specific interactions while shopping for clothes one afternoon because that child may have gone to the store only a few times. The adult, however, has probably gone shopping hundreds of times. The child has a more vivid memory for shopping that afternoon, but the adult has a richer, fuller memory for clothing stores in general.  Forgetting is not a breakdown of the memory system. It is a necessary function of learning.

Forgetting is required for accurate, selective remembering. Retrieval of one memory suppresses retrieval of other memories. Quick, precise recall results from forgetting what we don’t want to retrieve.  What people think of as good memory is actually the ability to forget the irrelevant. People who are better able to prune away irrelevant events are better able to remember pertinent events.

Forgetting allows us to concentrate. It prevents intrusive memory images from remaining too long in consciousness – those off-topic thoughts that distract us. (What will I make for dinner?  When did I last get my teeth cleaned?  What was that funny line from the movie last night?) We need to remember the ideas and images that are on topic, but to do so, we need to quickly forget those that are not pertinent.  Forgetting encourages what the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls flow, what Maslow called a peak experience – losing oneself in the activities of the moment. We appreciate the present more fully when we aren’t remembering the past. Forgetting disconnects the intrusion of memory, placing us more in the perceptual moment and pushing away memories that might distract us from the pleasure of appreciating the present. 

 Forgetting gets us through the slings and arrows of everyday life.