Nat Neurosci. Long-term memory for a common object. Cognitive Psychology. Rapid stimulation of human dentate gyrus function with acute mild exercise. Prefrontal atrophy, disrupted NREM slow waves and impaired hippocampal-dependent memory in aging. Why forget? On the adaptive value of memory loss. Perspect Psychol Sci. Your Privacy Rights. To change or withdraw your consent choices for VerywellMind. At any time, you can update your settings through the "EU Privacy" link at the bottom of any page.
These choices will be signaled globally to our partners and will not affect browsing data. We and our partners process data to: Actively scan device characteristics for identification. I Accept Show Purposes. What Does It Mean to Forget? Decay Have you ever felt like a piece of information has just vanished from your memory? Interference Sometimes people forget due to a phenomenon known as interference. There are two basic types of interference: Proactive interference is when an old memory makes it more difficult or impossible to remember a new memory.
Retroactive interference occurs when new information interferes with your ability to remember previously learned information. Failure to Store Sometimes, losing information has less to do with forgetting and more to do with the fact that it never made it into long-term memory in the first place.
Motivated Forgetting Sometimes we may actively work to forget memories, especially those of traumatic or disturbing events or experiences. Other Reasons Why You Forget There are also a number of other factors that can play a role in why people forget.
Other common causes of forgetfulness include: Alcohol : Drinking alcohol can have a negative effect on memory, so it is best to stick to no more than one or two drinks per day. Depression : Common symptoms of depression include low mood and loss of interest, but difficulty concentrating and forgetfulness can also occur with depressive disorders. Lack of sleep : Sleep plays an important role in memory consolidation , so a lack of quality sleep can have a negative impact on your memory. Medications : Some medications can affect memory including antidepressants, sedatives, and cold and allergy medications.
Stress : Excessive stress, both acute and chronic, can also play a role in causing forgetfulness. How to Minimize Forgetting While some forgetting is inevitable, there are some things you can do to help cement important information in your memory.
Some practices that may help reduce forgetfulness include: Exercise : Research suggests that exercise can lead to rapid improvements in memory function. There's no need to spend hours on the treadmill or at the gym to get this benefit. Results suggest that brief, very light exercise leads to quick enhancements in memory function.
Get plenty of sleep : Adequate sleep is essential for both physical and mental health. Both storing and losing memories are important for selecting and holding the most relevant information.
Forgetting helps to get rid of outdated information. Forgetting the details also helps to generalize past experiences into specific categories and thus create appropriate responses to similar situations in the future.
Forgetting details helps us to remember what needs to be remembered. You cannot craft a good text without deleting and proofreading its parts. As the saying goes, it is the empty space between the notes that makes the music. When we talk about forgetting in this article, we are not discussing forgetting related to dementia or any other neurodegenerative disease.
We are talking about forgetting processes that take place in a healthy individual and are essential for the healthy working of the brain. On a daily basis, our brain is bombarded with too much information.
Most of this information is more like noise that interferes with our decision-making and reduces the clarity of thoughts. Something needs to be done with this unneeded information. Forgetting improves the flexibility of the brain by removing such outdated and unnecessary information. It also helps to streamline our memory by eliminating useless details and generalizing the concepts involved. The function of memory is not to simply pass information through time, but also to optimize future decision-making.
Forgetting has a special function in the memorizing process. Remembering things has a cost for memory , thus forgetting irrelevant things is a cost-saving process. Information stored in long-term memory is surprisingly stable. The forgetting curve also showed that forgetting does not continue to decline until all of the information is lost.
Sometimes it might seem that information has been forgotten, but even a subtle cue can help trigger the memory. Imagine the last time you took an exam for school. While you might have initially felt forgetful and unprepared, seeing the information presented on the test probably helped cue the retrieval of information you might not have known you even remembered. So how do we know when something has been forgotten? Of course, many factors can contribute to forgetting.
Sometimes you might be distracted when you learn new information, which might mean that you never truly retain the information long enough to remember it later. Well-known memory researcher Elizabeth Loftus has proposed four key explanations for why forgetting occurs. These have led to some major theories of forgetting. What did you have for dinner Tuesday night of last week?
Is that difficult to recall? If someone had asked you that question Wednesday morning, you probably would have had no problem recalling what you had for dinner the night before. But as intervening days pass, the memories of all the other meals you have eaten since then start to interfere with your memory of that one particular meal. This is a good example of what psychologists call the interference theory of forgetting.
According to interference theory, forgetting is the result of different memories interfering with one another. The more similar two or more events are to one another, the more likely interference will occur. It is difficult to remember what happened on an average school day two months ago because so many other days have occurred since then.
Unique and distinctive events, however, are less likely to suffer from interference. Your high school graduation, wedding, and the birth of your first child are much more likely to be recalled because they are singular events—days like no other. Interference also plays a role in what is known as the serial position effect , or the tendency to recall the first and last items of a list. In all likelihood, you will probably be able to easily recall the first and last items on your list, but you might forget many of the items that were in the middle.
The first thing you wrote down and the last thing you wrote down stand out as being more distinct, while the fourth item and seventh item might seem so similar that they interfere with each other. Eliminating interference altogether is impossible, but there are a few things you can do to minimize its effects.
One of the best things you can do is rehearse new information in order to better commit it to memory. In fact, many experts recommend overlearning important information, which involves rehearsing the material over and over again until it can be reproduced perfectly with no errors. Another tactic to fight interference is to switch up your routine and avoid studying similar material back to back. For example, don't try to study vocabulary terms for your Spanish language class right after studying terms for your German class.
Break up the material and switch to a completely different subject each study session. Sleep also plays an essential role in memory formation. Researchers suggest that sleeping after you learn something new is one of the best ways to turn new memories into lasting ones.
According to the trace theory of memory, physical and chemical changes in the brain results in a memory "trace. Trace theory proposes that the length of time between the memory and recalling that information determines whether the information will be retained or forgotten.
If the time interval is short, more information will be recalled. If a longer period of time passes, more information will be forgotten and memory will be poorer. The idea that memories fade over time is hardly new. The Greek philosopher Plato suggested such a thing more than 2, years ago. Later, experimental research by psychologists such as Ebbinghaus bolstered this theory.
Those cheesy holes get filled in with information that may or may not be true. Then, when we are finished with the new version of the memory, the brain consolidates and "repacks" it, losing some facts and keeping some of that sketchy filler that's part truth and part fabrication. The more times we retrieve and recount a memory, the less trustworthy it becomes. These are the type of memories we tend to recount at regular intervals and then "repack.
When the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded in mid-air in , researchers asked students a series of questions 24 hours after the explosion and the same questions again two-and-a-half years later. Only seven percent of students showed near-perfect recall, and 68 percent reported a cobbled up mixture of accurate and inaccurate details.
Strangest of all, and perhaps most disturbing, one in four students reported things that were entirely different than what they originally reported just 24 hours after the incident. This is particularly distressing when you consider that our judicial system relies heavily on eyewitness testimony, especially in murder cases, even though this ultra-high stakes gamble on human memory has proven to be, shall we say, dicey.
The Innocence Project, dedicated to exonerating the falsely convicted, reports that among several hundred convictions overturned by DNA testing, eyewitness misidentification is the biggest contributor, accounting for a whopping 70 percent of wrongful convictions.
Aside from the fact that what you're remembering probably isn't all that accurate, there's the evidence that forgetting is actually a vital part of healthy brain function. As Eric Leuthardt writes at Psychology Today : "We forget not because we have an imperfect hippocampus our brain's memory organ ; it's actually an evolved solution. The ability to lose information allows new information to come in that is more relevant, more pertinent to an ongoing reality.
Forgetting allows us to update. In other words, forgetting is the brain's way of flushing out the irrelevant stuff so we can remember the important stuff.
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