The evolutionary benefits of being forgetful

Don’t despair! Asier Romero by Sven Vanneste, Trinity College Dublin and Elva Arulchelvan, Trinity College Dublin Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there – or perhaps someone says hi on the street and you can’t remember their name. But why do we forget things? Is it simply a sign of memory impairment, or are there benefits? One of the earliest findings in this area highlighted that forgetting can occur simply because the average person’s memories fade away. This comes from 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose “forgetting curve” showed how most people forget the details of new information quite rapidly, but this tapers off over time. More recently, this has been replicated by neuroscientists. The forgetting curve: Cloud Assess Forgetting can also serve functional purposes, however. Our brains are bombarded with information constantly. If we were to remember every detail, it would become increasingly difficult to retain the important information. One of the ways that we avoid this is by not paying sufficient attention in the first place. Nobel prize winner Eric Kandel, and a host of subsequent research, suggest that memories are formed when...