Whether it’s short or long term, humans have always have always had the ability to forget. When you’re walking through the local grocery market, and you completely forget what you wanted to get in the first place. Or when you raise your hand in class to answer a question, and when the teacher picks on you, what you were about to say slips and you’re left in an awkward silence. Forgetting is a normal part of life and in some ways it can be strangely essential to prevent an overload of information. We all forget now and then…but why?
To really understand forgetting, we have to take a look at remembering. In other words, how your brain stores information and calls upon that information. The basis of remembering is pure association. It’s how we, as babies, learned to talk and name different items in our lives. For example, when we see the sky, the color that is associated with the sky is blue. When we hear firetruck siren but don’t hear it, we automatically know it’s a firetruck. These associations are possible because of sensory stimuli in your brain. Basically, these sensory stimuli are interconnected networks that run throughout your brain. When groups of sensory stimuli get called upon often enough, these stimuli attach themselves to each other and form a network. As an over-simplistic example: one stimuli could be the sight of the firetruck, the other could be the sound of its siren. When you see a firetruck go by and hear that siren at the same time, these stimuli attach themselves and create a network of firetrucks. That’s why as young children, our brains are sponges sucking up information all around us. When born, our brain has little or nothing of the world around us. That’s why we’re slow to learn in our first few months. But our brain quickly starts making connections from basic associations. As we make more and more associations, there are more networks, which enable more complex associations to be made.
All these memories and associations are actually categorized in your mind. What are they categorized based on? A LOT of things. Think of the iTunes panel on your Mac or PC. You could choose to categorize your songs based on Name, Time, Artist, Album by Artist, and Rating. Your brain is similar because it really depends on what you’re looking for. But the core of organization in your brain is simply the relationships between the different things. And this goes back to sensory stimuli and associations. Think of your brain as a hard drive which can store vast amounts of information. But the information isn’t just piled one on top of another. It’s organized carefully. You can have different folders for Applications, Documents, and Downloads. And you can have folders in folders in more folders. Different files can contain more files and execute other files. It’s complicated enough on your computer, but what’s going on in your brain is much more intensifying.
Associations in the brain actually go a lot father back than you think. The entire memory of your brain is actually based on association. Association can be anything in reality: smell, sight, sound, taste, or touch. Or it can even be thought. But the key to each association is how often it is called upon to be associated. It all seems really complicated, but think of it like this. The information you collect is actually very temporary. For example, let’s say you spend about 10 minutes studying vocabulary that you have a quiz on the next day. That information is very short-term and will only last for a few weeks maximum if it’s never used again. The frequency of a memory is what makes a memory forgettable or one that can be remembered often. If you use that vocabulary in your day to day lives and understand it full-heartedly, then that information will stick. But if the only reason you’re memorizing those few words is for that quiz, then that information will soon get wiped out after that quiz is taken. This is why people these days are shifting away from year to year courses to learn a language. Instead, they are looking for simple techniques where they simply hear the words everyday and come to understand them. An example of this would be the Pimsleur Language program, which claims you can learn and speak a language in just 10 days compared to five years in school of tough memorization and test-taking. Basically, the more you call upon a memory, the less chance you have of forgetting it.
Another way to think of it is short-term and long-term information. There’s actually no such thing as long-term memories. Long term information is just short term information that has been called upon and been associated with several times. Short term memories are things that haven’t been associated with often and are easily forgotten. Now that you know how your brain remembers and stores information, let’s move on to the real question here: why do we forget things?
The brain is often regarded as the hard drive of our body, the big disc that holds all the information that lets our body function. Well, it is. But a function of the brain that people often forget is actually its function to forget. Yes, forgetting can actually be a function of the brain. The human brain can be thought of as a filter of information. Some good information, some bad information, and some useless information. One of the brain’s job is to dispose of this useless information. What is useless information? Well, as I said earlier, it’s the information not called upon and not associated with often. The information that the brain deems as useless. And so the brain can actually suppress this information from your mind. Again, think of it has a hard-drive. Though our brain is a lot different from a simple 200 GB hard-drive, our brain can still overload at some point. Too much information and data can cause distress and simply overload, just like a computer’s hard drive. Your brain needs to discard some useless information to be able to function cleanly. There are actually brain systems that solely erase information from your mind.
But what you don’t know is that much of the information that you forget isn’t erased from your mind, it’s simply suppressed by your brain. When your brain is repressing information, the hippocampus (hard-drive) of the brain is less active. Meanwhile the frontal cortex is doing a lot to prevent that information from getting accessed into your mind. There’s more blood and oxygen flow in that frontal cortex region. What does this all mean? Your brain is actually doing a lot to “forget” information. It doesn’t simply vanish into thin air, but is kept from entering your mind. Another computer analogy of this is the Recycling Bin or Trash Can on your PC or Mac. These icons suppress the information that you drag into them. The point of the Trash Can and Recycling Bin is so the information that is deemed useless by you doesn’t get in your way, and this is exactly what the frontal cortex does. This suppression of information is mostly active when people are trying to forget something.
But think about the Trash Can on a Mac computer. At any time, you can go in there and just drag that discarded information back into reality. You can do this in your brain as well, not with your cursor, but with more associations. If you see something now that reminds of you of something that happened 20 years ago, then you’ve just recovered that piece of information from your mind. That information is just lying there, waiting for an association to call upon it. That’s why your brain can never truly forget something naturally. All that information from when you were a year old is still there, lying in the corner. Maybe some day, you’ll see a picture or a toy and will instantly recognize it as something of your early life.
Forgetting is as natural in the human mind as breathing everyday. Though you can definitely learn to control your forgetfulness by calling upon your memories more often, it’s impossible not to forget something once in a while. Training your memory and filtering what information is important and useless is what leads to a successful mind that knows how to get things done.
The Daily Perspective 