Why do we forget?

Thanks to brain training companies, it seems everyone is trying to increase his or her memory. It’s easy to argue that better memory can only positively impact your life, but in fact forgetting serves an equally important role in cognition. Specifically, forgetting is necessary for two reasons- forgetting (especially of details) allows for automatized skills and semantic encoding and forgetting is emotionally adaptive to neglect some painful or negative memories.

First let us examine the case of AJ, a woman with highly superior autobiographic memory. If you were to ask AJ what happened 20 years ago on April 11, she could list exactly what she wore that day, along with all of her activities. Her memory is able to retain an episodic account of nearly every day of her life. However, this ability deeply intrudes on her life. She reports, “Most have called it a gift but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy” (Parker et al., 2006, p. 35). Imagine every time you went to the grocery store, you remembered every other instance of a trip to buy milk. It would be cognitively taxing and unnecessary to sustain all these individual memories. And in fact, a study by Logan and Crump (2009) demonstrated the necessity of losing detailed memory in professional typists, who aren’t able to verbalize where keys are located or how their hands are moving. Yet these workers are still extremely proficient in their job, and when they are asked to explicitly focus on what their hands are doing, their performance suffers. These typists do not have detailed memory of every time they sat down at a keyboard, but their skill demonstrates that a composite of all those experiences meshed together have given them their proficiency. Thus, forgetting may allow for details of episodes to be removed so that abstraction and generalized skill learning can occur.

As mentioned before, forgetting not only benefits cognition, but also assists in emotional stability. Joorman and colleagues (2009), among many others, have demonstrated that depression is linked to an inability to forget negative memories. Perhaps if we were able to remember every embarrassing moment and social faux pas, we would be less likely to take social risks or even engage with others at all. Forgetting negative experiences can help us stay open to new social experiences or maintain important relationships. Going back to the case of AJ, she was diagnosed with both depression and anxiety, maybe because she couldn’t forget her negative experiences. Thus, AJ exemplifies that there is no evolutionary benefit to remembering every negative experience.

Memory is unequivocally important for many functions, but forgetting also serves a purpose in maintaining healthy functioning. Without forgetting, we might be less positive about the future and unwilling to take the big risks that advance science and other fields. We would also be unable to garner abstract information from multiple situations or sources we encounter. Like tow sides of the same coin, forgetting and remembering balance each other.

Works Cited

Joormann, J., Hertel, P. T., LeMoult, J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2009). Training forgetting of negative material in depression. Journal of abnormal psychology, 118(1), 34.

Logan, G. D., & Crump, M. J. (2009). The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Right Hand Is Doing The Disruptive Effects of Attention to the Hands in Skilled Typewriting. Psychological Science, 20(10), 1296-1300.

Nørby, S. (2015). Why Forget? On the Adaptive Value of Memory Loss.Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(5), 551-578.

Parker, E. S., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical

            remembering. Neurocase, 12(1), 35-49.