The Power of Forgetting

Remember Me

Remember me is all I ask,
And yet
If the remembrance prove a task,
Forget.

~William Percy French

Over the last while I’ve been talking about the power of memory, and the power of a journal to help us notice and recall the facts and the feelings of our lives. And yet, there is also a place for forgetting in our lives.

Forgetting is a natural survival strategy. We can’t remember everything in our lives — if we could our lives would be much different, and not necessarily for the better. Humans actually try to forget the unpleasant parts of life and remember the pleasant ones, a tendency known as ‘motivated forgetting’. This makes our lives bearable, and liveable. Consider the case of a woman in California who wrote a book called The Woman who can’t forget. She became a minor celebrity due to her amazing recall for facts about disasters like airplane crashes and her own personal history — but a very interesting interview and article by Gary Marcus points out that the human mind is created to forget, and he was puzzled by her apparent perfect recall. Upon examining her story and discussing her case with her, he came to the conclusion that she did indeed have perfect recall: for those elements of her life that she had assigned great meaning to  and reinforced continually. One of the ways she reinforced these events was to journal, but almost obsessively so. At that point, journaling ceased to be a useful practice, instead becoming a kind of compulsion. Marcus says:

Every time we think about something, and especially how it connects to something else, we get better at remembering it—a phenomenon that psychologists call elaborative encoding. Price has spent her whole life ruminating on the past, constructing timelines and lists, and contemplating the connections between one February 19 and the next. Dates and memories are her constant companions, and as a result she’s really good at remembering her past…..

For her, it’s been a mixed blessing. Price doesn’t just remember the past, she feels it—vividly—and bad personal experiences linger.

Pushing bad memories to the side without dealing with them, repressing them, will only come back to haunt us. But never forgetting them can also hurt us. The human mind needs to forget, and allowing it to work its magic makes our lives easier. Journaling our days can help us remember them; but it can also help us express our emotional response to daily events and allow our minds to release some of those things from our conscious memory and free up our minds to move forward into our future. Don’t worry if you don’t have perfect recall: it is a natural occurrence, and a healthy one.

Related posts:

1. Staying Power of the Written Word
2. Memories…
3. Woman Power!