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“What is memory without forgetting?” asks Oliver Hardt, a cognitive psychologist studying the neurobiology of memory at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. “It’s impossible,” he says. “To have...
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Jul 28, 2021 · The ability to forget helps us prioritize, think better, make decisions, and be more creative. Normal forgetting, in balance with memory, gives us the mental flexibility to grasp abstract concepts from a morass of stored information, allowing us to see the forest through the trees.
Feb 14, 2024 · When we remember something, our brains need to learn it (encode), keep it safe (store) and recover it when needed (retrieve). Forgetting can occur at any point in this process. When sensory...
- Alexander Easton
If forgetting is the key to how the brain successfully processes the massive data input it encounters each day — as research accumulated so far suggests — then flaws in the forgetting process could plausibly contribute to brain disorders, Davis and Zhong note.
- Biology of Forgetting
- From Flies to Rodents
- Human Nature
- Trying to Forget
Different types of memory are created and stored in varying ways, and in various areas of the brain. Researchers are still pinpointing the details, but they know that autobiographical memories — those of events experienced personally — begin to take lasting form in a part of the brain called the hippocampus, in the hours and days that follow the ev...
A few years later, Hardt found something similar in rats. He was investigating what happens at the synapses of neurons that are involved in long-term memory storage. Researchers know that memories are encoded in the mammalian brain when the strength of the connection between neurons increases. That connection strength is determined by the amount of...
Researchers think that the human brain might operate in a similar way. “Our ability to generalize new experiences is, at least in part, due to the fact that our brains engage in controlled forgetting,” says Blake Richards, who studies neural circuits and machine learning at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Richards suggests that the brain’s a...
By better understanding how we forget, through the lenses of both biology and cognitive psychology, Anderson and other researchers might be edging nearer to improving treatments for anxiety, PTSD and even Alzheimer’s disease. Anderson’s work to measure GABA levels in the brain might indicate a mechanism that underpins the effectiveness of benzodiaz...
- Lauren Gravitz
- 2019
Feb 2, 2023 · Forgetting is important because if every time that we were trying to make a prediction about the future or understand what is going on right now, we had to sift through everything that’s ever happened to us, it would be inefficient.
Apr 28, 2022 · The brain forms memory with the help of a complex tool kit of neurotransmitters, proteins, and carbohydrates, as well as other cells, Small writes; forgetting, too, has its own set of dedicated...
