Fuhgeddaboudit, Really

Is it just me, or have we all become more forgetful lately?  Our iPhones have rendered us unable to add or spell, and good luck remembering an address or telephone number.  But it’s not just the technology.  We seem to breeze through many daily experiences, making details almost impossible to recall.  Names, faces, and news items from a few decades ago apparently were tucked away in a portion of my brain that no longer grants admittance.

According to Scott Small, a neurologist at Columbia University, our forgetfulness is a decided blessing.  A healthy brain regularly discards remembered detritus to unclutter our memory stores.  Forgetting gives us “mental flexibility” to prioritize, make better decisions, and organize abstract concepts so we can see the forest for the trees.  

Dr. Small describes two distinct “nano-machines” within neurons that promote memory and forgetting.  Experimenting with laboratory rats, researchers essentially hooked them up with knobs allowing the investigators separately to turn memory and forgetting up and down at will.  When learning a new maze, the rats greatly benefited from dialed up memory.  After the animal mastered the course, the maze was slightly altered, and the controls were manipulated.  Cranking up the memory knob was not nearly as effective as enhancing forgetting so the rat could modify her course instead of pursuing previously learned routes.  Could this be generalized to humans?

Since hooking up college sophomores to memory and forgetting knobs would be frowned upon by the ethics review panel, researchers had to identify a naturally occurring sample that was deficient in forgetting.  Welcome to the people with autism spectrum disorder who often lack the ability to forget.  Some people on the autistic spectrum can’t synthesize and generalize environmental cues because they lack behavioral flexibility.  Deprived of regular cortical pruning, they remember everything to their detriment.  The world seems chaotic, confusing, and unruly, so they insist upon maintaining sameness in their experiences to prevent being overwhelmed.  

Likewise, pathological inability to forget describes patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder who are doomed to relive their anxiety continually.  Even extreme nostalgia can deflate emotions when one pines excessively for the idolized past.  Frederich Nietzsche declared that happiness, virtuousness, and optimism depend upon “being able to forget at the right time as well as to remember at the right time.”

Long aware that memory consolidation occurs during dreaming sleep, I was surprised to learn that this crucial forgetting transpires at the same time.  Nobel laureate Francis Crick – of double helix DNA fame – hypothesized back in 1983 that “we dream in order to forget.”  Recent studies of sleep’s effect on creativity by keeping associations loose and playful validate Crick.  Thomas Edison was wrong to consider sleep a waste of time; it is a vital for survival.  Disorientation after prolonged sleep deprivation may be a consequence not so much of physical fatigue, but rather, of our brains bloated with unhelpful memories.

Dr. Small delivers other interesting observations.  Chimps are much more aggressive than their close cousins, bonobos.  It turns out that the more communal and rarely agitated bonobos have a less active area of the brain that stores fear memories.  

Initial relaxation from drinking alcohol relaxes emotional memories and renders us nice and friendly – until we drink too much.  Forgetting is essential to creativity as bonds between ideas are broken and innovative ones are formed.  Since memory comes with a price, no one should desire a photographic one.

I could do wonders with a forgetting knob for my patients in psychotherapy.  Imagine traumatized patients blanking out any memories of their ordeals.  Marriage counseling could move along swimmingly as partners decamp from their endless repetition of accusations for wrongs.  Divorced parents might forgo enmity and cooperate for the good of their children.  The benefits of surgical forgetfulness are endless.

I enjoyed a good memory throughout the first five decades of life that I too often took for granted.  I considered forgetting to be a consequence of not really paying attention to topics in the first place or letting too much time elapse without repetition.  I still think these are factors.  Small’s research suggests that I also enjoyed timely forgetting each night that ridded me of redundant and outdated information and allowed me to generalize experiences into categories instead of separate pieces of knowledge.  I thought I was merely having sweet dreams.

I’m required to memorize many fewer things at this stage of my life.  My line dancing hobby requires active learning as I observe and copy patterns on the dance floor.  When I apply the rodents’ maze learning to my own, I do see similarities.  Dances with step sequences very similar to other, previously learned patterns require an uncoupling of associations.  When learning any new dance, I must retain my knowledge of familiar steps but remain flexible to their novel arrangement.  I wonder if I can get wired with a forgetting knob!

When I reflect upon my life, I’m pleased with the memory store I retain.  The ups and downs, sunrises and sunsets, social connections and withered relationships, and all the mundane connective tissue add up to a happy tenure on this planet.  Columnist Franklin Pierce Adams observed, “Nothing is more responsible for the good old days than a bad memory.”  But I don’t idolize the past so much as I enjoy replaying the experiences I still remember.  When we get the equation right, we can sing with Carly Simon, “These are the good old days,” assuming we can remember the words.