What If I Could Remember Everything?

Far from being a flaw, the ability to forget may play a crucial role in the brain’s memory system, according to Professor Oliver Hardt

- Jason Goodyer

Your work focuses on forgetting… Professor Oliver Hardt

The majority of the public, and also many of my colleagues, think of forgetting from the perspective of memory failure. Forgetting is thus considered to be a glitch of memory. It is a relatively recent view in my field that forgetting could be a fundamental function of the memory system, something that it needs to function properly. On one hand there is a system that constantly makes sure that structures that have been formed during memory formation are maintained, and, at the same time, there’s a process that tries to eliminate these structures. We now refer to this process as an ‘active forgetting mechanism’, a process that brains use to remove memories with the goal to keep memory optimally functional.

So, forgetting is a good thing?

I think there is a bliss in forgetting. Most of what you experience you can really forget. It improves the adaptive aspect of the memory system in the sense that the brain really only retains what is considered useful for the major tasks at hand, to improve chances of survival. If, for example, you experience a situation that allows for 20 possible reactions based on a comprehensive and unselective catalogue of past events, but actually only two were effective, you have a high chance of selecting a wrong course of action. But, if the memory system is designed to make sure you only retain the best responses, then perhaps you only have to select from four choices, and the chance of you doing the right thing is much higher.

How does the brain decide which memories to remember and which to forget?