How to be better at forgetting

In this age of misinformation, we should value forgetting as much as we do remembering.  You must experience this with your own self or with other people where we become human Googles – absorbing all sorts of data without ever really investigating its truth or getting a sense of where we stand on it, at least for the moment. This is also true when we are faced with so many options that we just want it all and end up not having any, addicted but paralyzed too by limitless options. While it could initially be stimulating and interesting, it could be exhausting. For our experiences and memories to be meaningful, we need to forget as much as need to remember.

First, why is it impossible to remember everything? This is because it is not useful to do so. Our brains are always naturally looking to “settle”, to come up with a decision on what to do with information so that it can move on. It always has to come up with a picture of the world for you to act on. This means that you have to know what relevant information to pick up and what to let go at any given moment. If you are in a crowd and you see someone armed and who is about to fire, you are only alerted by the memories you have of people who were armed and who caused harm rather than those who were armed but were just poking fun. This will make you instantly go for safety measures and not make funny faces with the ones sporting guns.

For me, this also explains in part why science – which is a multi-step process of testing and analyzing – is not a natural comfort zone for humans. There is always room for doubt in science and the constant updating and rethinking it requires calls for a lot of mental discipline that could be literally exhausting for the brain’s resources.  Humans generally find solace in certainty, even if it really does not exist. We love and devour information but also need to have a picture of the world that makes sense to us even if they are not anchored on facts. This explains why superstition or any hard core belief becomes a settling zone when we are all faced with too many things to consider, at certain times, or for a whole lifetime.

But why is it also hard to forget certain things? Studies have constantly shown that experiences with emotional values are the ones that stay with us longer and deeper than neutral ones. This is what ad agencies know so well – that is why their creative people make the most emotional videos even when they are based on what otherwise would be the most mundane of things – like fastfood or sanitary napkins, hooking them with human rites of passage like the sweetness of youth, weddings or sickness. You are most likely going to remember those videos better.

These studies on emotionally laden memories also found that when it comes to their “stickiness”, the negative ones are the most stubborn to leave our heads compared to positive ones or neutral ones. This would explain why when you have been having a great day and then just before you hit your pillow and you get a message and you find out that one thing went wrong, you will immediately feel rotten. That memory you just made will overwhelm the more positive memories which you have, in fact, earned for the most part of the day. This is why studies have shown that you have to actively remember things to be grateful for about the day in order to shift your assessment of your day and transform your mood.

This is also why wars of a thousand or more years ago persists as the living memory of one group over another waging violence against each other today.

So then, how do we forget bad memories? I wish I could tell you that science has now made that memory zapper from Men in Black available in your local convenient store but not yet. So far, for the deeply traumatic ones, scientists have been testing medication that seem to be effective in muting fearful memories both in humans and mice. Many more tests would have to be done with these before we can really just safely pop a pill to delete memories that will not help us with our lives.

But on our own, we can cultivate a habit of forgetting. Scientists call this “direct forgetting” where we can train our brains to mark a memory to go to the trash bin to be incinerated. This throws the popular belief that constantly trying to resist remembering an undesirable event will make it stick more. So far, there is evidence that on your own, constantly preventing an undesirable memory to become a member of your mental household could work. Studies have also shown that already having a “proactive” filter of what you will ignore (like the beep or flash of your phone) while you want to focus on something is very useful in helping us have get into the habit of productive forgetting.

A recent study took this further and tested whether a kind of meditation called “mindfulness” could be better at training ourselves to intentionally forget certain things. They were surprised to find that mindfulness did not help to forget more and in fact, helped even to remember even the neutral things.

Many people would always invoke “remembrance” of memories to move us to have a better world. This is because history is not a stale record of people, places and events that have been. They are memories – entities that live in our head and therefore guide our present utterances, rages and actions. Remember, always remember, so it will not happen again. But this is also the spirit behind vendettas of nations and ethnicities against each other even against the background of scientific fact that there is NO such thing as race.  Maybe it is time we also consciously invoke a measured amount of obliviousnes to our past pains so we could wipe the slate clean in some aspects of our lives and give a better chance for a better world. To remember is human but to forget may help us become even better humans. – Rappler.com