It pays to forget, new study claims

Toronto Sun:

Just forget it.

New research published in the journal Current Directions in Psychological Science claims that if you forget pointless facts you have a better memory for important things.

Benjamin Storm, an assistant professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago, says that “we need to realize that under some conditions (forgetting) actually does play an important role in the function of memory.

“Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” Storm said in a statement. Memories and associations can “completely overrun our life and make it impossible to learn and retrieve new things if they were left alone, and could just overpower the rest of memory.”

In one experiment conducted by Storm and a team of scientists, participants were asked to memorize a list of birds. In the next part of the test, they were asked to remember half the birds.

Read the full story: Toronto Sun