The paradox of remembering by forgetting

In some ways, this research restates the 'naive' discoveries most of us make about revision and retelling of stories of things that happen to us. However, it does take us further forward in thinking about mechanisms and so the possibility of helping ourselves to remember more effectively. I see shade of some of the techniques used by NLP in this, too.

The act of remembering is a complex cognitive activity because memory is associative, Wagner said, meaning that when someone, for example, thinks about what they ate for lunch the day before, it's likely to tap into memories of other lunches. "In order to remember, we need a set of mechanisms that allows us to select and target the memories we want, and allow them to win out over competing but irrelevant memories," he said. "So, initially, any act of retrieval is very resource intensive and places heavy demands on attention mechanisms in the prefrontal cortex." But when the competing but unimportant memories are successfully suppressed, fewer demands are placed on the frontal lobes to remember the relevant memories.

Now we just need to work on weakening those memories we don't want like the menu when we were revising 'that' topic over lunch ...
ScienceDaily: Forgetting Helps You Remember The Important Stuff, Researchers Say

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