Remembering Makes Us Forget
According to an article in the Telegraph, if you remember this post, the memory of another one will die off. Not just this post, of course, but all memories. A study by researchers at University of Birmingham and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge have shown that remembering makes us forget as the process of recall actually causes us to lose other memories. Doesn't seem a bad thing, does it, if we could actually choose which memory we wanted to ditch when the new one was formed, but I don't think it works quite like that. It's the 'intentional recall' apparently that leads us to forget other experiences which interfere with retrieval. The research is published in the Nature Neuroscience . and is the first to isolate this 'adaptive forgetting mechanism' in the human brain. We often say "the more I try to remember, the more I forget" and this research more or less sums this up. ...