But before you run off to the nearest self-defense store to purchase a memory-jogging device—wait! A radical method such as this is only the second-best solution. A much more important piece of advice is this: even when you seem to have forgotten things from your past, your brain is able to dig them out—when they become important. Very little information is actually deleted permanently. Most of it exists in a waiting state. The brain’s supposed weakness (namely, that it quickly blocks out and seems to forget so many things) turns out to be its strength, enabling it to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, the brain avoids getting bogged down with too much information. And secondly, this enables it at a later time to more flexibly select which information should be remembered. If the brain had to decide immediately which new information, and in which context, should be stored long-term, it would be too sluggish. We are only capable of building up new knowledge when our memories are unstable.
The intellectual tax return
IT SOUNDS LIKE a paradox to claim that the brain is able to produce new knowledge precisely because the brain is so bad at retaining information accurately. The way our memory is organized seems to go against our everyday experience. If we want to organize something in real life, we do it in a particular location. We save our tax documents and receipts in a certain folder, which we place into a cabinet where we can easily find them later on. We put a receipt for a business meal into a folder labeled “Additional Expenses” (if the deal was a good one), and that is how we create order, avoid chaos, and work productively.
The brain is theoretically equipped to do the same thing, to store information in a way that is spick-and-span, orderly and efficient. But it doesn’t. If it did, it might be able to master its forgetfulness, but the brain would thereby lose one of its greatest strengths in the process—namely, its ability to dynamically combine information. If you sort your information too early on, it’s much harder to put things into a different kind of order later down the road. This pinpoints the difference between a brain and a computer. Whereas a computer mindlessly saves information, the brain creatively combines it to make something new.
Thus, if you were to ask your brain to file an intellectual tax return, it would never sort the business meal receipts into detailed folders but would first put them all into a single stack and mark them each in different ways. You could use the business meal receipts to find out a variety of things. You could review whether a certain restaurant was too expensive, what exactly you ate, or what your client enjoyed eating. This manner of flexible organization only works, however, if you do not determine too early on how the information should later be used, allowing you in retrospect to decide what to do with any given piece of information.
The benefit of shaky memories
THE ABOVE MIGHT sound strange but scientific studies have confirmed it.7 Test participants were first asked to memorize a list containing words from four different categories (furniture, modes of transportation, vegetables, and animals). Shortly thereafter, they had to learn a typed keyboard combination by heart. Unbeknownst to them, the order of the combination followed the pattern of the word categories (a piece of furniture corresponded to the typed number 1, a mode of transportation with number 2, a vegetable with number 3, and an animal with number 4). The list of words and the keyboard combination both followed the same basic structure, so it was no surprise that the test subjects were able to learn the keyboard combination with remarkable speed, since it matched the word list form they had memorized earlier. What was interesting, however, was that in a follow-up test twelve hours later, the subjects’ ability to type in the correct key combination improved the more they had forgotten the list of words—as though the word scheme had been directly “copied and pasted” onto the scheme of keyboard keys.
You are doubtless already familiar with this scientific hypothesis: the more insecurely we save and store a piece of data, the easier it is to combine it with other things. Every piece of information that has not yet been fixed into our memories finds itself in a strange state. It may interact with other impressions and input and influence the learning process. Of course, because the memory must be unstable and shaky, information may also be more easily lost in this state.
In order to gather new knowledge, we are therefore compelled to forget concrete details. But forgetting details isn’t such a bad thing since, first of all, the enormous mass of corresponding details would eventually overwhelm even the best brain. And second of all, details really aren’t that important. We pick up on patterns, abstract correlations, and the stories behind them—not the little things that often only serve to trip up the brain. In other words: forgetting is a means to an end.
Mental digestion
RECENT RESEARCH HAS shown there is one thing that the brain especially requires to fulfill all of its functions: taking breaks. This is particularly a problem in our modern era, where we are inundated with news headlines, articles, phone calls, and emails. As soon as our brains receive a new piece of information, another piece of information comes along to compete with it. Under such conditions, it’s hard for us to evaluate (and forget) individual memories in order to build up new knowledge.
This is why, at this point, I am going to say: don’t overstrain your brain’s filter—and forgetting—system. Instead, make sure to give it breaks and rest at regular intervals. Because we don’t learn when we think that we are learning. We learn in the pauses between the thinking. Just as athletes don’t improve during their training, but rather in the rest periods between training sessions when they allow their bodies to adapt and heal.
When I read the newspaper over breakfast in the morning, I don’t look up the most recent news stories on my smartphone afterward while I’m on the subway. Instead, I wait. I allow myself to get a little bored. This requires a fair amount of courage, as anyone knows who commutes on the subway and who is not absorbed on their smartphone. You start to feel a bit like a communication relic from the 1990s, locked out of the modern Apple and Android universe. But I know it’s worth receiving pitying glances from fifteen-year-olds who just earned their latest Candy Crush levels on their phones.
I know I won’t be able to remember all of the details I read in my morning newspaper over breakfast. But just as my gastrointestinal tract is digesting my muesli and breaking it down into individual components from which my body will later generate new cells (hopefully a lot of muscles and as few fatty tissues as possible!), my brain is also, in this moment, breaking down the pieces of information from my morning. I can no longer taste the muesli in my stomach any more than the newspaper articles are still present in my mind. But they are having an effect on my brain. And depending on how my day goes, my brain will dig out some or other piece of news from earlier in the day, combine it with the present moment and allow me to brag about my knowledge (which I really enjoy doing). This is only possible if I have taken sufficient informational breaks to allow for mental digestion.
Forgetting in order to retain
NOW YOU KNOW why we (seem to) forget so many things in life. Either they are so homogenous that our brain’s information filters cannot distinguish them, or else they are so important that they first have to float around in an unsorted limbo in our subconsciousness so that they can later resurface to combine more flexibly with other bits of information. Strictly speaking, you don’t actually forget about these things. You simply