About the Role of Forgetting or Why We Remember Selectively

Many times, we complain that we do not remember the things we need and force our memory, sometimes in vain, to obtain information that has been accumulated for a long time and that we do not know when and where we lost it.

Not to mention the situations in which we forget where we put who knows what thing and we look for it for hours around the house, trying to remember in our mind the route we took with that object.

Yes, forgetting is annoying many times, but it plays an important role in the functioning of memory.

Forgetting is necessary

Memories and associations build up quickly in the brain, and thinking and memorizing are two difficult activities. If there were no forgetting, "memories could invade our lives and make it impossible to learn new things, they would take over our entire memory," says American professor and psychologist Ben Storm.

Fortunately, we can forget useless information to remind ourselves of the information we need. Researchers are trying to figure out how our minds select the things they think we need to remember. So they did an experiment, in which the participants were given to memorize a list of birds.

Then they were asked to perform a task that required the memory of half of the birds. Trying to remember half of the birds naturally made them forget the other half. Although it does not seem like it, this is a good and very useful thing.

It has been found that people who are good at forgetting information they don't need are good at solving problems and remembering certain things when they are distracted by other information. This shows that forgetting plays an important role in problem solving and memory.

More simply, the role of forgetting in memory can be demonstrated in various everyday situations. For example, if you change your phone number and someone asks for your new number, it would be confusing for you to keep remembering the old number instead of the new one.

We need to be able to update our memory so that we can remember the things that are relevant today.

What do we forget and what do we remember?

Although in most cases, it bothers us to forget, there are situations, usually painful ones, in which we want to forget more than anything. However, painful, emotional memories are the hardest to forget, especially when created by visual cues.

It is easy to forget neutral information, but psychologists have found that emotional events, even those with a light emotional charge, can be very difficult to forget.

When people intentionally try to forget certain information, they must separate it in their minds and block the information they do not want to remember. However, this can only happen in the case of information without emotional charge.

Emotion undermines these steps because people tend to make all sorts of connections between certain events and parts of their lives and are therefore difficult to isolate. Emotion makes events striking and, therefore, very accessible. The good news is that pleasant emotional information is hard to forget, not just unpleasant information, which helps us to remember the happy events in our lives that we would not want to forget.

We must be aware, however, that emotion sets certain limits on our ability to control our minds. However, if the motivation to forget certain emotional events is strong enough, in time, we can get over such memories.

We cannot control everything we forget or remember, and this can sometimes confuse us, but we must view forgetting as a useful and even indispensable process for maintaining the health of our minds. And we have to admit that sometimes forgetting is what helps us move forward.