forgetting is the most underrated superpower of the brain
have you ever wondered
what if you could remember everything you have ever experienced
every detail every feeling of every second
what would you become
you might think that sounds amazing
no need to study for exams
no need to take notes in meetings
whatever the other person said during an argument
you could repeat it back word for word
it sounds like a superpower
right
but people like this really exist
medically it is called hyperthymesia
only a few dozen people worldwide have been diagnosed
there is an American woman named Jill Price
she can remember everything that happened every single day since she was fourteen
name any date at random
she can tell you what day of the week it was and what the weather was like
what she ate and what was in the news
but guess how she describes her own life
she says it is a kind of torture
because she remembers not only the happy things
but also every detail of every humiliation
every heartbreak every night she wished she could forget
those memories do not lie quietly in a filing cabinet
they are alive
they can jump out at any moment
carrying a hundred percent of the original emotional intensity
hello
hi everyone
I am Wang Lijie
in today's episode
I want to talk about something we all fear but should actually be grateful for
forgetting
our culture holds a deep rooted prejudice against forgetting
forgetting means having a bad memory
a bad memory means your brain is failing
we buy all kinds of supplements to boost our brains
we do all kinds of memory training
we even fear getting Alzheimer's when we grow old
essentially
we treat forgetting as the enemy
but over the past decade
a major shift in understanding has emerged in neuroscience
scientists discovered
forgetting is not a malfunction of the brain
it is a function of the brain
not a system crash
but system maintenance
your brain is actively and strategically deleting information every moment
this is not a flaw
this is by design
in 2017
the top neuroscience journal Neuron published a landmark paper
the authors were Davis and Zhong Yi
they proposed a subversive idea
forgetting is the brain's default state
memory is the exception
you heard that right
the brain's default operation is not to remember
but to forget
memory does not happen naturally
it is the result of the brain working hard to fight against forgetting
it is like swimming in a river
stay still and you get washed away
you have to keep paddling just to stay in place
memory is that paddling motion
forgetting is the river itself
what did they find
there are cell circuits in the brain dedicated to forgetting
these circuits release dopamine
activating a protein called Rac1
and Rac1 then directs another protein called Cofilin
to dismantle synaptic connections
what are synaptic connections
they are the physical carriers of memory
every one of your memories
corresponds to a specific pattern of connections between a group of neurons in the brain
break the connections
and the memory disappears
this is not random damage
it is precise removal
the brain knows which to remove and which to keep
in 2020
the Annual Review of Psychology published another important paper
the authors were Anderson and Hanslmayr
they found
the prefrontal cortex suppresses memory retrieval in the hippocampus from the top down
what does that mean
it means the region of your brain in charge of decision making and control
actively holds down the region in charge of memory
keeping certain memories from being recalled
it is like a company CEO telling the archive keeper
seal this file
don't release it to anyone
you might ask
why would the brain bother deleting what it worked so hard to store
in 2020
Fawcett and Hulbert published a review
summarizing the functions of forgetting into three roles
I find this framing quite brilliant
the first role
the guardian
forgetting protects your sense of self
have you ever noticed
the you in your memory is always a little better than the real you
those moments that made you cringe with embarrassment
the details slowly blur over time
those times you hurt other people
the version you remember is often gentler than what actually happened
this is not self deception
it is the brain helping you maintain a self that can function normally
if you remembered every stupid thing you ever did in perfect detail
you would not even have the courage to leave the house
the second role
the librarian
the brain's capacity is theoretically huge
but its retrieval speed is limited
imagine
if your head were crammed with every meal you have eaten since childhood
how long you waited at every red light
what every stranger you passed looked like
when you need to recall something truly important
how long would you have to dig through this pile of junk information
forgetting is like a strict librarian
constantly pulling outdated repetitive and irrelevant information off the shelves
making sure that when you need it
the important books are in the most visible spot
in 2007
Kuhl and colleagues published a study in Nature Neuroscience
using brain imaging to prove
that once interfering memories are successfully forgotten
the cognitive load on the prefrontal cortex drops significantly
in plain language that means
after forgetting the unimportant things
the brain becomes more efficient at handling the important ones
the third role
the inventor
this one is probably the most counterintuitive
forgetting can actually boost creativity
think about it
what is the essence of creativity
it is connecting things that seem unrelated
but if your memory of everything is extremely precise and concrete
it actually becomes hard to see the similarities between things
because you get drowned in the details
all you see are differences
moderate forgetting makes memory more abstract and blurry
and it is precisely this blur
that lets you see patterns analogies and hidden isomorphisms across different fields
have you ever had this experience
you think about a problem for a long time and can't crack it
you sleep on it and suddenly it clicks
that is not because your brain worked overtime while you slept
it is because your brain was subtracting
it deleted the details that cluttered your thinking
leaving behind the structure that truly matters
so the moment you open your eyes
the answer is right there
in my years of investing
I have felt this very deeply
do you know the famous concept in investing called loss aversion
for the same ten thousand dollars
the pain of losing ten thousand
is twice the joy of earning ten thousand
why is that
because the memory of loss is more stubborn and vivid than the memory of gain
and harder to forget
I have seen too many investors held hostage by the memory of one painful past loss
every detail of that loss carved into their minds
so they can never make a rational judgment when a similar opportunity appears
not because the new opportunity is bad
but because the old scar is too vivid
the librarian in their brain
has gone on strike at that shelf
the best investors share one common trait
they can extract lessons from failure
and then cleanly forget the emotion of the failure itself
keeping the pattern
deleting the trauma
isn't that the brain's active forgetting mechanism at its best
at this point
I want to share an older piece of wisdom with you
Buddhism has a core concept called letting go
many people think letting go is a moral demand
as if the Buddha were saying you should let go of your attachments and stop craving
but from a neuroscience perspective
the phrase letting go describes exactly the brain's most basic operating mechanism
think about it
what is attachment
attachment is when certain memories get over consolidated
and the forgetting mechanism fails on them
after a breakup you keep recalling the other person's smile
after being humiliated you keep replaying that scene
after a startup fails you keep going over what went wrong
these memories are like books nailed to the shelf
the librarian can't pull them off no matter what
a 2024 paper published in Molecular Psychiatry
found
people with impaired active forgetting are more prone to intrusive memories
the kind of uninvited compulsive memory replay
which is precisely one of the core symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder
in other words
it is not that your memory is too good so you can't let go
it is that your forgetting function is broken
the files that should be deleted can't be deleted
you may have heard that famous Zen story
Shenxiu said
the body is a bodhi tree
the mind is like a bright mirror stand
wipe it clean diligently at all times
do not let it gather dust
this is really saying
you must keep actively forgetting the negative distracting and obscuring things
to keep your mind clear
but Huineng said something more radical
bodhi originally has no tree
the bright mirror has no stand
originally there is not a single thing
so where could dust ever gather
savor the difference between these two levels
Shenxiu is saying you must learn to forget
Huineng is saying
when you take forgetting to its extreme
you find that the very self that needed protecting can also be let go
even the librarian can clock out
this is strikingly isomorphic with the logic of the brain's active forgetting
the brain's forgetting system does not exist to protect some fixed self
it is a dynamic constantly updating process
the you today and the you ten years ago
share almost none of the same memories anymore
you think that constant self has always been there
but it is actually being re edited every day
what's interesting is
when we turn our attention to artificial intelligence
we find that AI is deeply troubled by a problem directly related to forgetting
this problem is called catastrophic forgetting
when a neural network learns task A and then goes on to learn task B
it forgets everything it knew about task A
it is not selective forgetting
it forgets everything
it is like learning English
and suddenly not being able to speak Chinese
the human brain never works this way
learning to ride a bike doesn't make you forget how to walk
learning Japanese doesn't make you forget Chinese
why
because the human brain has a precise active forgetting mechanism
it knows what to forget and what to keep
it knows how to keep the balance between old and new knowledge
in 2023
Nature Machine Intelligence published a paper
researchers drew on the biological forgetting mechanism in the fruit fly brain
to design a new AI architecture
and they found
once they gave the AI a biological like forgetting function
its continual learning ability improved dramatically
do you see the irony here
humans desperately try to remember more
yet AI researchers discovered
that teaching machines to forget is the key to higher intelligence
forgetting matters not only during training
AI faces the same problem while it is working too
today's most advanced large language models
have context windows that can hold a million tokens
in theory
the more information you give it the smarter it should be
right
the truth is exactly the opposite
many experiments show
the fuller you stuff the context window
the worse the model performs
because most of the stuffed in information is noise
the model has to find the few truly relevant clues in a pile of noise
it is like asking you to find one specific key in a warehouse full of clutter
the bigger the warehouse and the more clutter
the slower you search and the easier to get it wrong
so a truly excellent AI workflow
does not dump all the information in at once
it carefully filters like the brain's librarian
keeping only the information the current task truly needs
keeping the context just right
you see
even silicon based intelligence can't escape this rule
bigger capacity is not better
finer management is better
this is exactly the same underlying logic as the biological brain's active forgetting mechanism
what's even more interesting
meditation research is confirming this too
several brain imaging studies found
the prefrontal cortex activity patterns of long term meditators have changed
their inhibitory control over emotional memories and automatic thoughts is significantly stronger
in other words
meditation may be training the librarian in your brain to do its job better
seasoned meditators haven't gotten better memories
their forgetting has become more precise
better at deciding what to keep and what to throw away
so you see
from neuroscience to Buddhism
from AI research to meditation practice
all these seemingly different fields point to the same conclusion
the essence of intelligence is not unlimited memory capacity
but precise information management
and the most core operation of information management
is precisely deletion
I often say
we live in an age of information overload
every day scrolling phones watching news listening to podcasts reading articles
thinking we are acquiring knowledge
but have you ever wondered
how much of the information we take in is truly worth remembering
and how much just takes up space on the brain's shelves
so that when you need to make a major decision
you can't find the one book that truly matters
the ancients said
learning reveals how much you don't know
but let me say something sharper
the real masters are not those who learn the most
but those who forget the most precisely
knowing what to remember is just being smart
knowing what to forget is wisdom
maybe true wisdom is not remembering more
but forgetting more
not stuffing more into your brain
but letting the librarian in your brain work more diligently
your brain does this for you every second
silently and without reward organizing that vast library of memory for you
you just never knew it
and never thanked it
next time you forget where you put your keys
don't rush to blame yourself for a bad memory
maybe your brain is just busy deleting less important things for you
to free up space so you can think clearly about what truly matters
the best memory in this world
is not remembering everything
but knowing what to forget
what do you most want to forget
and what is your brain still holding onto for you
that you wish it would delete
share your thoughts in the comments
I am Wang Lijie
see you next time