To Remember, the Brain Must Actively Forget

#TIA – If the race is to be won by forgetting first before remembering, we’re well on our way.

“Decades of research have focused on how the brain acquires information, resulting in theories that suggest short-term memories are encoded in the brain as patterns of activity among neurons, while long-term memories reflect a change in the connections between neurons.

What hasn’t received nearly as much attention from memory researchers is how the brain forgets. “The vast majority of the things that are happening to me in my life — the conscious experience I’m having right now — I’m most likely not going to remember when I’m 80,” said Michael Anderson, a memory researcher at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying forgetting since the 1990s. “How is it that the field of neurobiology has actually never taken forgetting seriously?””

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