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National Geographic

Yes, you can teach yourself to forget. And here's why you should

Earlier this year, 20-year-old Vishvaa Rajakumar memorized 80 random numbers in 13.5 seconds—roughly six numbers per second. This feat helped him win the Memory League World Championship, a tournament that pushes memory to its extremes. In another challenge, participants memorized the order of an entire shuffled deck of cards. Even if your memorization skills wouldn't win an international competition, having an above-average memory is considered a prize. Nearly three-quarters of adults say they play games like crossword puzzles not only for fun, but to improve their memory. After all, having a good memory is associated with sharpness and intelligence, while aforgetfulness is a quality linked to scatterbrains and mental decline. But as I've learned from cognitive scientists, an outsized spotlight on memory can lead us to neglect that forgetting is an equally important skill. Without forgetting, our minds would be cluttered with unnecessary, outdated, and sometimes emotionally painful information. And while, most of the time, forgetting happens outside our awareness, scientists have learned that people can have a surprising amount of control over what we don't want to remember. Indeed, forgetting is a skill we can foster to influence well-being, creativity, and change what we fundamentally know about ourselves. Some psychologists are now teaching forgetting as a tool to help with symptoms of depression or anxiety. And as technology like our phones or social media take on a larger role in what we remember, it may be a critical time to not only boost our memories but become better forgetters too. Why forgetting is good for us We start to forget as soon as we begin to remember, said Jonathan Fawcett, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, and this is a good thing. Take the example of Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevsky, who had an extraordinary capacity to rapidly remember minute details, even phrases in a foreign language and meaningless mathematical formulas . But he also had trouble concentrating with so many memories swirling around in his head. At times, Shereshevsky desired to forget so badly that he would write down a memory and then light the paper ablaze in an attempt to clear his mind. It was no use. 'Not even fire could wipe out the traces he wanted to obliterate,' the neurologist A.R. Luria, who studied Shereshevsky, wrote. Most of us don't have to resort to such destruction. Forgetting is usually mindless. We form vivid memories by paying attention to details that will prove to be useful in the future, while information we don't attend to or that we don't need to know doesn't get encoded. Even when a memory is formed, it can be later lost through forgetting processes when a memory weakens over time, or through interference—when newer memories compete with older memories, updating or replacing them. Such forgetting takes place without any effort, and sometimes without an explicit desire to forget, like when you can't find your keys because you weren't paying attention to where they were placed. But people partake in a more intentional kind of forgetting on a daily basis, said Michael Anderson, a cognitive psychologist and neuroscientist at The University of Cambridge. Motivated forgetting, as it's also called, takes place when someone has a vested interest in not remembering something. How to forget Researchers find a person can either stop a memory from forming in the first place, or stop an unwanted memory from surfacing, weakening it. Fawcett has shown how to accomplish the former in 'directed forgetting' experiments. In the lab, people are shown a list of words, followed by the directions to forget or remember them. It's that easy. In the end, participants have a better memory for the words they were told to hang on to, and a worse memory of the words they were told to forget. The 'forget' words weren't committed to memory simply because participants were told they wouldn't need them later. In our everyday lives, of course, there aren't directions telling us what to remember and what to discard. But the exercise shows that it's possible to encounter a piece of non-useful information, and intentionally let it go. Another kind of motivated forgetting is when people selectively choose to remember certain memories over others that are similar—strengthening the chosen memory and leading to an atrophy of the less favoured one. This is called 'retrieval-induced forgetting,' and through it, people can shape their own life stories. For example, imagine an embarrassing karaoke night where you fell off the stage during a rendition of Pink Pony Club. If you talk about that evening with your friends, but avoid talking about the stumble, over time, more positive aspects of the experience would grow into a more prominent memory. You might remember hitting the high note while belting 'I'm just having fun,' or your friends' laughter over the bruises. 'By selectively choosing what to think about and what to recall, we actually change our own internal self-narrative,' Fawcett said. People are more likely to remember information that matches what they believe about themselves. If you consider yourself to be reliable, you will remember all the times you brought your sick friend soup, and now how you forgot your mom's birthday. Those memories then reinforce your self-image as a reliable person. Another common form of motivated forgetting occurs when older memories are suppressed after being triggered by a reminder. For example, you might see a car that looks like your ex-partner's. Normally that would trigger you to painfully remember a past romantic road trip. But instead of dwelling on the past, researchers find you can quickly push that memory out of your mind. Anderson came up with an experiment to study this inhibitory memory process in what he called 'think, no-think experiments.' He asked people to remember pairs of words, like lawn and beef, and consider one to be a cue for the other. Then he would tell certain participants to try not to remember the word beef when they saw the word lawn. Anderson has compared this kind of forgetting to stopping a physical action; if you reach out and touch a hot pan handle, the next time you grab for it, you may catch yourself before you do. 'Stopping cognition is every bit as important as stopping action,' he said. And in fact, when Anderson and his colleagues looked at people's brain activity during 'think, no-think' tasks, they observed an inhibitory process that looked similar to stopping a physical movement. Stopping your hand from reaching out to touch a hot handle sends a signal going from the prefrontal cortex to the movement areas of the brain. When a person stopped a memory, a signal was sent instead to the hippocampus, the brain's memory center. Stopping a memory in this way had later consequences for forgetting. After shoving those memories away, they started to diminish. In a study from 2023, Anderson and his colleagues successfully trained participants to stop thinking about worries—past and future— about the COVID-19 pandemic. In more 'think, no-think experiments,' people came up with reminder words paired with disturbing thoughts, like the memory of visiting a family member in the hospital. When people were cued with their reminders—the word breathing, for example— they were told to either think about their memory, or to not think about it. After a three-day training, the 'no-think' groups reported less detailed and less emotionally urgent memories than the 'think' group. 'It suggests that people can become better at intentional forgetting,' Fawcett said. 'They can effectively be trained to do it.' Three months later, the participants' memories were still less upsetting, and 80 percent of them said they were still practicing thought suppression techniques. Yes, forgetting can be that easy If it seems too easy to just tell yourself not to remember something, some of Anderson's study participants certainly thought so too. 'I couldn't believe how effective it was,' one told the researchers three months after the study ended. 'I always thought that just dismissing thoughts would make things worse.' The social psychologist Daniel Wegner suggested that asking people not to think of something—like a white bear—would make them think about it more. But Anderson's work has shown that this isn't always the case. Still, Anderson said that motivated forgetting is a kind of skill, one that takes effort and practice, and comes more naturally to some people. Taking the time to master it could be worth it for mental health benefits, he says. In his COVID study, people who began the study with higher levels of anxiety reported larger improvements in measurements of anxiety, negative emotions, and depression after it was over. And past studies have found that those who performed better on 'think, no-think' tasks had less distressing intrusive memories after watching a violent movie. In 2020, a study found that the survivors of the 2015 terrorist attack in Paris who did not have PTSD tended to be better at memory suppression than those who did. 'We all have experiences that are negative,' Fawcett said, like embarrassing yourself at karaoke, or calling someone by the wrong name. 'The brain has mechanisms which are capable of pushing those thoughts out of mind.' Is technology changing how we forget? The brain can push thoughts out, but increasingly, technology is letting some slide back in. One recent afternoon, my iPhone lit up with a notification: 'You have a new memory.' A few seconds later, I was watching a slideshow titled 'Back in the Day' of me smiling in front of taxidermied animals at the Philadelphia Natural History Museum while instrumental music played. Before the notification, if you asked me if I've ever visited the museum, I would have recalled and said 'yes.' But the details of the dioramas, and how many I had posed with, had slipped my mind. I felt annoyed that my phone had been right: it was like a new memory, because I had forgotten it. When our phones surface an old photo, it likely makes the memory of the event stronger, says University of California Irvine psychologist Benjamin Storm. Perhaps after years of pushing the stumble off the karaoke stage out of your mind, your iPhone goes ahead and reminds you right about it! On the other hand, a phone memory may dull similar memories associated with that event, which you did not photograph. Storm wondered what aspects of my Philadelphia trip I may have forgotten since I engaged with the photo album my phone made for me. The impact of this was probably benign, but other curatorial choices could have bigger ripple effects on a person's memory. In 2022, journalists at the tech website 9to5Mac reported that iPhone 'memories' were not including photos from sensitive locations, like Holocaust memorial sites. 'It's uncomfortable to think about how much power technologies have to potentially shape how we remember ourselves,' Storm said. As our phones bombard us with 'new' memories we would have forgotten, while keeping other memories concealed, it's even more important to sharpen our forgetting skills. People will probably always want to improve their memories, Fawcett said. But in the midst of practicing memory palace exercises, embrace being a good forgetter too. Outside of easing anxiety and shaping our sense of self, forgetting makes our memories flexible. In turn, this mental fuzziness might be what makes us creative, suggests Steve Ramirez, a National Geographic Explorer and neuroscientist at Boston University. 'We can begin to use memories as building blocks, to combine and recombine them in new ways, to predict an uncertain future,' he said. How could we ever come up with new ideas, if our brains were full of rigid unforgettable old ones? You shouldn't try to forget every negative experience you've ever had, Anderson warned, but recognize that you are capable of, and likely already doing, a lot of motivated forgetting. It may not win you any impressive memory championships, but what you've forgotten is just as much a part of your life's story as what you're proud to remember. This article is part of Your Memory, Rewired, a National Geographic exploration into the fuzzy, fascinating frontiers of memory science—including advice on how to make your own memory more powerful. Learn more.