This excerpt from an article by Ingrid Wickelgren, writing in the Scientific American, has really made my morning. I have valued being able to remember, and despaired at times over my own vague blanks. But now I’m heartened (as a blurry-headed person) and fascinated (as a teacher of critical thinking) by the important role for decision making and emotional health of forgetting. Wickelgren documents the case of Solomon Shereshevsky, who remembered so readily and completely that “the weight of all the memories, piled up and overlapping in his brain, created crippling confusion.”
“The act of forgetting,” she writes, “crafts and hones data in the brain as if carving a statue from a block of marble. It enables us to make sense of the world by clearing a path to the thoughts that are truly valuable. It also aids emotional recovery. …. In recent years researchers have amassed evidence for our ability to willfully forget. They have sketched out a neural circuit underlying this skill analogous to the one that inhibits impulsive actions.”
