Why do we forget?

The brain, with its 100 billion neurons, allows us to do amazing things like learning multiple languages ​​or building things that send people to outer space. However, despite this amazing capacity, we can not remember where we put our keys, we forget why we went to the grocery store and can not recall our personal life events. This apparent contradiction in functionality gives rise to the following question: Why do we forget some things, but do we remember others? . You can imagine this as a sandwriting message with every ocean wave flowing over the shore, writing becomes less readable until it eventually disappears entirely. Sand is the network of brain cells that make up memory in the brain, and ocean waves are the time that passes. Interferences Often, in contrast to aging, we can talk about interference.

It is believed that In our example of sand, this would mean that instead of the slow corrosion of the message, a child comes and writes over it. This makes the message more difficult, or even impossible, to perceive. The child in this example is a new experience and the message he writes is the information left behind in the brain by that experience. This leads to oblivion, because it essentially overwrites the original memory. This is a process that can also lead to the creation of false memories.

What Sadeh and his colleagues in Canada illustrate is that these theories do not have to compete with each other. Both decay and interference are important to understanding forgotten. According to their paper, Researchers have found support for their oblivion theory by conducting a word memorization experiment with 272 students at the University of Toronto. The participants were randomly assigned under experimental conditions that varied according to how long they had waited for the learning of words and the need to remember them, as well as the extent to which their memory was interfered with by the things they had to do between learning and remembering. According to the authors, they found support for the idea that a memory can take the form of two different representations in the brain - familiarity or memory.

So, what did I learn? . .