From misremembering the names of our acquaintances, to failing to recall a memory accurately, for decades we have viewed forgetfulness as a shortcoming of the human mind. Yet recent neuroscience and psychology demonstrates this to be a myth, argues Scott A. Small. From creativity to intelligence and empathy to courage, the art of forgetting may be more vital to the human condition than remembering.

It used to be thought that forgetting anything — from minor things like the name of a casual acquaintance, to the more painful loss of cherished memories experienced by my Alzheimer’s Disease patients — was caused, to varying degrees, by a failure of the brain’s memory mechanisms. But new developments in neuroscience over the past decade show that this idea is deeply flawed.

SUGGESTED READING Remembering your self By Muireann Irish An understanding of recent literature on the brain demonstrates why this is the case: Neurons contain what are sometimes called nanomachines that are dedicated to the construction of new memories. But recently, science has discovered that neurons are also endowed with a completely different set of nanomachines designed for the opposite purpose: to carefully disassemble — and thus forget — components of our stored memories.

In contrast to ‘pathological’ forgetting, the forgetting that worsens as we age and in disease, normal forgetting, the forgetting we are born with, can no longer be thought of as a malfunction of our memory machinery. Instead, normal forgetting should be considered a healthy and adaptive part of our brain’s normal functioning.

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Memory and forgetting work in unison

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