Most of us tend to (0) REGARD forgetting as an inconvenience, if not a failure of the brain. Yet modern research increasingly suggests that the ability to forget is, in many ways, just as important as the ability to remember. Without some mechanism for letting go of irrelevant information, our minds would quickly become with details we no longer need.
Memory, scientists now argue, is not a single process but a collection of overlapping systems. Short-term memory allows us to track of a telephone number long enough to dial it; long-term memory stores everything from childhood experiences to the grammar of our native language. Between the two working memory, which plays a crucial role in reasoning and problem-solving.
What determines whether a piece of information is retained for the long term? Much of the answer in how deeply it is processed at the moment of encoding. A phone number repeated mechanically is likely to fade within seconds, whereas a conversation that engages our emotions can remain vivid for decades. The context in which we learn something — where we were, how we felt, who we were with — also has a profound on what we remember.
It is also worth noting that our memories are not fixed recordings. Every time we up a memory, we subtly alter it. Details may be added, others lost, and gaps may be filled by what we expect to have happened. This is why eyewitness testimony, once considered highly reliable, is now with considerably more caution by the courts.
Understanding the strengths and limits of memory will not make us immune to forgetting, but it may help us to better use of the remarkable — and remarkably fallible — system we all carry around inside our heads.