Forgetting something — whether it's a colleague's name or where we put our keys — can be deeply frustrating. This week, psychologist Ciara Greene helps us explore the science of forgetting. We look at why our minds hold on to some memories for a lifetime, but discard others within seconds. And we grapple with a question many people ask themselves: Is my forgetfulness a sign that something is wrong with me?In this episode, you'll learn about: *The neurological underpinnings of memory*Why forgetting is a core part of how our minds work *Why this process of forgetting can sometimes be a good thing*How our psychological states shape what we remember, and how we frame our memories*Why we should treat our memories with skepticism and our forgetfulness with compassion Hidden Brain is going on tour! Join us as Shankar shares key insights from the first decade of the show — more info and tickets can be found here: https://hiddenbrain.org/tour
Chapter 1: What is the significance of forgetting in our lives?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In Chinese mythology, Meng Po is sometimes known as the goddess of oblivion. She polices the land of the dead and has a special responsibility. She makes sure that souls on their way to being reincarnated do not remember their past lives. To ensure this, she prepares a soup with five ingredients.
Her five-flavored soup of oblivion produces immediate and permanent amnesia. The soul can now proceed to be reincarnated with no memory of previous lives. There are rare occasions when spirits fail to drink the five-flavored soup, and when these souls are reincarnated, they become humans who can remember their past lives.
Nearly every culture in the world has stories and legends about memory and forgetfulness. Our ability to remember long ago events is a signature accomplishment of the brain. Our inability to remember important things is an endless source of frustration. Today on the show and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we examine the science of forgetting.
We look at why our minds hold on to some memories for a lifetime but discard others within seconds. And we answer a question many people ask themselves. Is my forgetfulness a sign that something is wrong with me? Forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. This week on Hidden Brain. In Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations, we are introduced to the character Miss Havisham.
Many years earlier, she was jilted at the altar on her wedding day. She becomes obsessed with this moment and cannot move on from it. She surrounds herself with reminders of that day, wearing her wedding dress and keeping the clock stopped at the exact moment of her wedding. In so doing, she becomes consumed with sadness. She becomes a prisoner of her own memories.
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Chapter 2: How do memories shape our identity?
The memories we carry say a lot about who we are and how we see the world. At University College Dublin, psychologist Keira Green studies how memories are formed and the roles that both remembering and forgetting play in our lives. Keira Green, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hi Shankar, thanks for having me.
Kira, I want to talk about something that happened to you some time ago. You live in Dublin, and it's common for people to get around by bike. You were riding your bike on the way to a piano lesson. Can you describe the day for me?
Sure. It was about three years ago and it was a rainy November night and it was dark and it was starting to rain and it was just a kind of cold, miserable night. And I was leaving work to go to my piano lesson and I was in a rush. So, you know, I rushed down the stairs and I got down to my bike and I realised I'd forgotten my helmet.
So I rushed back upstairs and all the way back up through this very large building and got my helmet, went back down. So then I was running late for my lessons.
Ciara started zipping through the night to her class. The roads were slick.
I was cycling through Donnybrook, which is a kind of a busy road. And on that road, there's a lot of buses, there's a lot of cars, there's a lot of cyclists. And what there isn't on that part of the road is a bicycle lane. The bicycle lane had stopped earlier. So in fact, as I was cycling along, I was weaving around traffic and in around buses. So I was cycling on wet roads. It's going too fast.
And you can probably see where this is going because I skidded on the bike and I skidded right in front of a bus, which fortunately didn't hit me. But it was one of those e-bikes and electric bikes that has, you know, the electric power in it, which means it's very heavy and the down tube is really heavy. So as I fell, my leg got caught in the down tube. and snapped my leg in half.
It's like if you could imagine a little small bunch of twigs and then you snap those twigs. They don't snap cleanly. They snap with shards. And I had this very strange experience where I, you know, I've heard of this happening before, but I'd never experienced it where I didn't feel the pain straight away. I was lying on the ground and, you know, you get that moment of shock.
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Chapter 3: What lessons can we learn from Ciara's bike accident?
It helps us to hold on to the things that really support us to live our lives. So like, if we think about not just like what memory is, but what memory is for, That memory isn't something that was just kind of created out of whole cloth. It's something that we evolved.
And we evolved... All the kind of... Both the physical and the mental attributes that we have evolved are things that have survived evolution because they offer us some kind of benefit for either survival or for reproduction. So all of these kind of... what we see as memory distortions or memory errors or sometimes called memory sins.
All of these things that sometimes are annoying to us, but actually, really, a lot of these are things that we have evolved to be able to do and they are functional. They support us to live, thrive and survive. OK, so they help us to be happier. And if we look at, say, things like mental health, being happy, having good mental health has huge survival advantages.
So we know that people who are happier live longer. They're healthier, you know, all of these things. So it's not just a kind of touchy-feely, oh, I'll feel better. It's like these things actually have survival benefits.
Kira and other researchers have found that even our pernicious tendency to remember negative things about our political opponents and positive things about our political allies, even this likely has functional benefits from an evolutionary point of view, even if it might be bad for democracy.
So we have a lot of work looking at, say, false memories for fake news, showing that people, firstly, that people can very easily form false memories. If I show you a news story about like a political scandal that never happened, there's a fairly decent chance that you will go, oh, yeah, yeah, I remember that.
And you'll tell me where you remember it from and how you felt at the time and all kinds of things. OK, even though we just made it up. But what we find really consistently is that that is way more likely if that story is congruent with your existing ideological views.
So if it's a story that reflects well on your group or reflects badly on the other side, you're much more likely to form a false memory for that than you are if it reflects well on the other team or reflects badly on your team.
And again, that is part of that idea where we think it's a part of kind of shoring up those social bonds that we're kind of reinforcing that sense of identity with our social groups. And, you know, being part of a social group is, again, a hugely important survival factor. And humans are social animals. We don't survive well on our own.
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