It’s early Monday morning and you realise you forgot to pick up your dry cleaning, you
can’t find your keys and then you have no idea what your Facebook password is.
As you start to panic, it feels like your memory kind of sucks.
But your brain is designed to forget.
And it’s not necessarily a bad thing.
[BrainCraft intro]
Psychological theories try and make sense of why we forget pieces of information, like
all of our passwords.
Decay theory suggests we can’t retrieve information because over time, traces of our
memories fade away and eventually disappear.
Interference theory suggests new memories compete with our existing ones.
When new information is similar to a memory you already have, the new information interferes
with your ability to recall that existing memory.
And in some cases, we didn’t even store a thought as a memory in the first place.
Neuroscientists suggest many of these theories could be intertwined - at a tiny molecular
level in your brain.
We have a “forgetting protein” in our brains called Musashi.
It messes with the function of our synapses, structures that let nerve cells communicate
with each other.
Another protein called Adducin, has the opposite effect and actually stimulates the growth
of our synapses.
Remembering and forgetting thoughts is like a street fight between Musashi and Adducin.
Their interaction and who wins depends on whether our thoughts transmitted across our
synapses are stabilized and stored permanently in our memory.
In one study, researchers genetically modified some ringworms - let’s just call them teenage
mutant ninja worms - so their brains didn’t contain musashi.
The regular and mutant worms learned new information just as well, but the mutant worms -- without
Musashi -- had much better recall of information.
They were less forgetful.
By removing the “forgetting protein” we learn more about how it works.
It could help us understand disorders where people lose their memories, like Alzheimers,
and how to treat them.
But, sadly, we can’t go removing Musashi from our brains to have a super powered memory.
Our brains forget on purpose.
We need to forget because the ability to lose information keeps our brains flexible so they
can absorb new things.
If we didn’t forget, we’d constantly recall all kinds of random, extraneous information
and we wouldn’t be able to focus on the present.
Forgetting your passwords is frustrating, but it’s totally normal.
As we go about our daily lives, we subconsciously find a balance between remembering and forgetting.
So a "brain fart" or a “seniors moment” isn't all that bad.
Forgetting actually helps you remember.
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