Forget worrying about memory lapses

An absent-minded moment may actually be a sign of a healthy level of creativity or focus.

Many people worry that forgetting names, facts or tasks is a sign of ageing or mental decline.

A growing body of research offers a more welcome excuse: forgetting stuff can be a by-product of rigorous thinking, smooth decision-making or heightened creativity. Forgetting can help us block out useless or outdated information and keep us from fixating on a single set of ideas.

And rather than reflecting withering brain cells, forgetfulness can be driven by the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, a brain region linked to memory.

This doesn’t excuse major memory mishaps. And purposeful forgetting doesn’t include the kind of extensive memory loss that comes with dementia or similar health problems.

Still, forgetting can serve a purpose, enabling us to think more clearly by eliminating interference from competing thoughts.

This pattern is called retrieval-induced forgetting. It’s directed in part by the prefrontal cortex, which controls executive functions involved in mental control and decision-making. It makes it easier to access memories that get used a lot and more difficult to retrieve memories that compete with them, says Michael C. Anderson, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at the University of Cambridge in England. He likens the process to search-engine optimisation for the brain. “The brain balances remembering and forgetting gracefully to facilitate optimal use of memory,” Anderson says.

Understanding that people’s memories are malleable can be helpful to managers. After one of Susan Weinschenk’s consulting teams had a bad experience with a difficult client, she called team members together for a debriefing and listened to their frustrations.

Then, she encouraged them to turn their focus to what they could learn from the experience, and to parts of the project that turned out better because of their work.

“Now you can move on,” Weinschenk, a behavioural scientist and consultant at The Team W in Wisconsin, told them.

The discussion changed how employees remembered the project. “Now when the name of that client comes up, we remember the lessons instead of the bad feelings. And we’re able to laugh about it,” she says.

The mind also tends to suppress memories that are irrelevant at the moment. The brain undertakes a building process to accomplish this. Mice trained to find a certain location in a maze have an easier time forgetting the training and learning a new route if researchers induce neurogenesis, or growth of new neurons in the brain, when they’re trained to find a different location, says Paul Frankland, a senior scientist at the Hospital for Sick Children, an affiliate of the University of Toronto, and co-author of a 2017 research review on the topic.

Researchers believe a similar process occurs in humans.

Eliminating unneeded details from memory makes it easier to draw general conclusions and spot abstract patterns based on our exper­iences.

“Our memory systems didn’t evolve to be good at Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! but to enable us to be smart about how we think and act,” says Blake Richards, assistant professor of neuroscience and machine learning at the University of Toronto and co-author with Frankland of the 2017 review.

Forgetting prevents a memory problem called interference, which causes you to recall incorrect information because it’s similar to the memory you want, Richards says. This happens when, say, you mix up the names of people who play similar roles — calling your current intern, whose name is Matt, by the name of your intern last year, Mike, or when you suffer the tip-of-the-tongue syndrome, unable to recall a word or name because your memory of a similar one is blocking it.

Forgetting also helps solve another thinking problem called fixation, or a blind adherence to ideas, solutions or designs that already exist.

By clearing the mind of past patterns and practices, forgetting can make way for breakthrough thinking, says Benjamin Storm, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California and co-writer of numerous studies on the role of memory and forgetting in creative thinking. “One of the biggest obstacles to thinking of something new and different is our old ideas, our current perspective and things we already know. Forgetting is at the heart of getting around that,” he says.

Deep concentration can temporarily erase irrelevant details from the mind. Novelist Jill Shalvis sometimes becomes so consumed by writing and creating scenes in her mind that she leaves her house wearing her jumper inside-out or shoes that don’t match.

Thinking hard about ideas or problems also can disrupt your ability to remember why you decided to do some other, less-important chore or task, says Chris Bailey, author of Hyperfocus, a book on staying productive amid distractions.

He sometimes finds himself walking into his kitchen and realising he has forgotten the reason he wanted to go there. “It’s usually a sign that I need to let my mind wander a little, and carve out more space to process that problem or decision,” he says.

The Wall Street Journal