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forgetting is the most underrated superpower of the brain

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have you ever wondered

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what if you could remember everything you have ever experienced

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every detail every feeling of every second

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what would you become

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you might think that sounds amazing

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no need to study for exams

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no need to take notes in meetings

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whatever the other person said during an argument

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you could repeat it back word for word

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it sounds like a superpower

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right

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but people like this really exist

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medically it is called hyperthymesia

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only a few dozen people worldwide have been diagnosed

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there is an American woman named Jill Price

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she can remember everything that happened every single day since she was fourteen

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name any date at random

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she can tell you what day of the week it was and what the weather was like

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what she ate and what was in the news

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but guess how she describes her own life

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she says it is a kind of torture

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because she remembers not only the happy things

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but also every detail of every humiliation

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every heartbreak every night she wished she could forget

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those memories do not lie quietly in a filing cabinet

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they are alive

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they can jump out at any moment

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carrying a hundred percent of the original emotional intensity

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hello

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hi everyone

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I am Wang Lijie

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in today's episode

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I want to talk about something we all fear but should actually be grateful for

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forgetting

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our culture holds a deep rooted prejudice against forgetting

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forgetting means having a bad memory

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a bad memory means your brain is failing

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we buy all kinds of supplements to boost our brains

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we do all kinds of memory training

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we even fear getting Alzheimer's when we grow old

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essentially

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we treat forgetting as the enemy

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but over the past decade

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a major shift in understanding has emerged in neuroscience

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scientists discovered

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forgetting is not a malfunction of the brain

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it is a function of the brain

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not a system crash

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but system maintenance

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your brain is actively and strategically deleting information every moment

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this is not a flaw

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this is by design

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in 2017

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the top neuroscience journal Neuron published a landmark paper

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the authors were Davis and Zhong Yi

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they proposed a subversive idea

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forgetting is the brain's default state

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memory is the exception

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you heard that right

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the brain's default operation is not to remember

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but to forget

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memory does not happen naturally

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it is the result of the brain working hard to fight against forgetting

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it is like swimming in a river

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stay still and you get washed away

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you have to keep paddling just to stay in place

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memory is that paddling motion

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forgetting is the river itself

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what did they find

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there are cell circuits in the brain dedicated to forgetting

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these circuits release dopamine

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activating a protein called Rac1

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and Rac1 then directs another protein called Cofilin

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to dismantle synaptic connections

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what are synaptic connections

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they are the physical carriers of memory

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every one of your memories

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corresponds to a specific pattern of connections between a group of neurons in the brain

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break the connections

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and the memory disappears

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this is not random damage

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it is precise removal

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the brain knows which to remove and which to keep

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in 2020

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the Annual Review of Psychology published another important paper

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the authors were Anderson and Hanslmayr

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they found

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the prefrontal cortex suppresses memory retrieval in the hippocampus from the top down

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what does that mean

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it means the region of your brain in charge of decision making and control

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actively holds down the region in charge of memory

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keeping certain memories from being recalled

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it is like a company CEO telling the archive keeper

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seal this file

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don't release it to anyone

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you might ask

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why would the brain bother deleting what it worked so hard to store

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in 2020

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Fawcett and Hulbert published a review

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summarizing the functions of forgetting into three roles

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I find this framing quite brilliant

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the first role

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the guardian

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forgetting protects your sense of self

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have you ever noticed

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the you in your memory is always a little better than the real you

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those moments that made you cringe with embarrassment

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the details slowly blur over time

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those times you hurt other people

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the version you remember is often gentler than what actually happened

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this is not self deception

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it is the brain helping you maintain a self that can function normally

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if you remembered every stupid thing you ever did in perfect detail

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you would not even have the courage to leave the house

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the second role

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the librarian

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the brain's capacity is theoretically huge

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but its retrieval speed is limited

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imagine

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if your head were crammed with every meal you have eaten since childhood

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how long you waited at every red light

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what every stranger you passed looked like

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when you need to recall something truly important

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how long would you have to dig through this pile of junk information

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forgetting is like a strict librarian

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constantly pulling outdated repetitive and irrelevant information off the shelves

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making sure that when you need it

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the important books are in the most visible spot

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in 2007

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Kuhl and colleagues published a study in Nature Neuroscience

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using brain imaging to prove

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that once interfering memories are successfully forgotten

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the cognitive load on the prefrontal cortex drops significantly

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in plain language that means

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after forgetting the unimportant things

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the brain becomes more efficient at handling the important ones

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the third role

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the inventor

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this one is probably the most counterintuitive

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forgetting can actually boost creativity

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think about it

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what is the essence of creativity

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it is connecting things that seem unrelated

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but if your memory of everything is extremely precise and concrete

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it actually becomes hard to see the similarities between things

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because you get drowned in the details

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all you see are differences

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moderate forgetting makes memory more abstract and blurry

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and it is precisely this blur

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that lets you see patterns analogies and hidden isomorphisms across different fields

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have you ever had this experience

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you think about a problem for a long time and can't crack it

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you sleep on it and suddenly it clicks

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that is not because your brain worked overtime while you slept

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it is because your brain was subtracting

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it deleted the details that cluttered your thinking

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leaving behind the structure that truly matters

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so the moment you open your eyes

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the answer is right there

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in my years of investing

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I have felt this very deeply

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do you know the famous concept in investing called loss aversion

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for the same ten thousand dollars

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the pain of losing ten thousand

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is twice the joy of earning ten thousand

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why is that

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because the memory of loss is more stubborn and vivid than the memory of gain

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and harder to forget

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I have seen too many investors held hostage by the memory of one painful past loss

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every detail of that loss carved into their minds

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so they can never make a rational judgment when a similar opportunity appears

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not because the new opportunity is bad

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but because the old scar is too vivid

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the librarian in their brain

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has gone on strike at that shelf

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the best investors share one common trait

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they can extract lessons from failure

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and then cleanly forget the emotion of the failure itself

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keeping the pattern

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deleting the trauma

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isn't that the brain's active forgetting mechanism at its best

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at this point

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I want to share an older piece of wisdom with you

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Buddhism has a core concept called letting go

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many people think letting go is a moral demand

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as if the Buddha were saying you should let go of your attachments and stop craving

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but from a neuroscience perspective

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the phrase letting go describes exactly the brain's most basic operating mechanism

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think about it

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what is attachment

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attachment is when certain memories get over consolidated

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and the forgetting mechanism fails on them

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after a breakup you keep recalling the other person's smile

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after being humiliated you keep replaying that scene

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after a startup fails you keep going over what went wrong

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these memories are like books nailed to the shelf

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the librarian can't pull them off no matter what

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a 2024 paper published in Molecular Psychiatry

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found

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people with impaired active forgetting are more prone to intrusive memories

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the kind of uninvited compulsive memory replay

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which is precisely one of the core symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder

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in other words

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it is not that your memory is too good so you can't let go

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it is that your forgetting function is broken

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the files that should be deleted can't be deleted

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you may have heard that famous Zen story

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Shenxiu said

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the body is a bodhi tree

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the mind is like a bright mirror stand

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wipe it clean diligently at all times

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do not let it gather dust

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this is really saying

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you must keep actively forgetting the negative distracting and obscuring things

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to keep your mind clear

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but Huineng said something more radical

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bodhi originally has no tree

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the bright mirror has no stand

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originally there is not a single thing

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so where could dust ever gather

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savor the difference between these two levels

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Shenxiu is saying you must learn to forget

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Huineng is saying

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when you take forgetting to its extreme

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you find that the very self that needed protecting can also be let go

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even the librarian can clock out

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this is strikingly isomorphic with the logic of the brain's active forgetting

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the brain's forgetting system does not exist to protect some fixed self

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it is a dynamic constantly updating process

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the you today and the you ten years ago

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share almost none of the same memories anymore

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you think that constant self has always been there

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but it is actually being re edited every day

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what's interesting is

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when we turn our attention to artificial intelligence

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we find that AI is deeply troubled by a problem directly related to forgetting

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this problem is called catastrophic forgetting

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when a neural network learns task A and then goes on to learn task B

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it forgets everything it knew about task A

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it is not selective forgetting

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it forgets everything

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it is like learning English

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and suddenly not being able to speak Chinese

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the human brain never works this way

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learning to ride a bike doesn't make you forget how to walk

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learning Japanese doesn't make you forget Chinese

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why

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because the human brain has a precise active forgetting mechanism

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it knows what to forget and what to keep

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it knows how to keep the balance between old and new knowledge

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in 2023

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Nature Machine Intelligence published a paper

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researchers drew on the biological forgetting mechanism in the fruit fly brain

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to design a new AI architecture

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and they found

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once they gave the AI a biological like forgetting function

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its continual learning ability improved dramatically

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do you see the irony here

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humans desperately try to remember more

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yet AI researchers discovered

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that teaching machines to forget is the key to higher intelligence

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forgetting matters not only during training

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AI faces the same problem while it is working too

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today's most advanced large language models

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have context windows that can hold a million tokens

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in theory

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the more information you give it the smarter it should be

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right

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the truth is exactly the opposite

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many experiments show

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the fuller you stuff the context window

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the worse the model performs

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because most of the stuffed in information is noise

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the model has to find the few truly relevant clues in a pile of noise

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it is like asking you to find one specific key in a warehouse full of clutter

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the bigger the warehouse and the more clutter

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the slower you search and the easier to get it wrong

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so a truly excellent AI workflow

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does not dump all the information in at once

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it carefully filters like the brain's librarian

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keeping only the information the current task truly needs

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keeping the context just right

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you see

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even silicon based intelligence can't escape this rule

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bigger capacity is not better

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finer management is better

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this is exactly the same underlying logic as the biological brain's active forgetting mechanism

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what's even more interesting

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meditation research is confirming this too

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several brain imaging studies found

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the prefrontal cortex activity patterns of long term meditators have changed

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their inhibitory control over emotional memories and automatic thoughts is significantly stronger

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in other words

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meditation may be training the librarian in your brain to do its job better

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seasoned meditators haven't gotten better memories

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their forgetting has become more precise

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better at deciding what to keep and what to throw away

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so you see

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from neuroscience to Buddhism

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from AI research to meditation practice

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all these seemingly different fields point to the same conclusion

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the essence of intelligence is not unlimited memory capacity

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but precise information management

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and the most core operation of information management

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is precisely deletion

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I often say

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we live in an age of information overload

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every day scrolling phones watching news listening to podcasts reading articles

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thinking we are acquiring knowledge

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but have you ever wondered

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how much of the information we take in is truly worth remembering

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and how much just takes up space on the brain's shelves

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so that when you need to make a major decision

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you can't find the one book that truly matters

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the ancients said

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learning reveals how much you don't know

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but let me say something sharper

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the real masters are not those who learn the most

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but those who forget the most precisely

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knowing what to remember is just being smart

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knowing what to forget is wisdom

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maybe true wisdom is not remembering more

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but forgetting more

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not stuffing more into your brain

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but letting the librarian in your brain work more diligently

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your brain does this for you every second

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silently and without reward organizing that vast library of memory for you

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you just never knew it

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and never thanked it

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next time you forget where you put your keys

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don't rush to blame yourself for a bad memory

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maybe your brain is just busy deleting less important things for you

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to free up space so you can think clearly about what truly matters

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the best memory in this world

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is not remembering everything

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but knowing what to forget

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what do you most want to forget

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and what is your brain still holding onto for you

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that you wish it would delete

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share your thoughts in the comments

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I am Wang Lijie

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see you next time