Forgetting is Key to a Healthy Mind (preview)

Features | Mind & Brain See Inside

Letting go of memories supports a sound state of mind, a sharp intellect--and superior recall

By Ingrid Wickelgren ?| December 23, 2011

Image: Photoillustration by Aaron Goodman

In Brief

1. We can will ourselves to forget; a neural circuit like the one that inhibits actions governs the ability to reject memories we neither want nor need.
2. Emerging data provide support for Sigmund Freud?s controversial theory of repression, by which unwanted memories are shoved into the subconscious.
3. The inability to forget can impede emotional recovery in trauma victims; it is also associated with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder.
4. If you practice rebuffing recollections, you are likely to get better at it.

Solomon Shereshevsky could recite entire speeches, word for word, after hearing them once. In minutes, he memorized complex math formulas, passages in foreign languages and tables consisting of 50 numbers or nonsense syllables. The traces of these sequences were so durably etched in his brain that he could reproduce them years later, according to Russian psychologist Alexander R. Luria, who wrote about the man he called, simply, ?S? in The Mind of a Mnemonist.

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