Why Forgetting Is Good For Your Memory

Huffington Post:

Forgetting could help you remember.

Huh?

That’s the conclusion of new research from the University of Illinois at Chicago. We wouldn’t be able to learn new information if we didn’t forget some things, researchers said.

“Memory is difficult. Thinking is difficult,” study researcher Ben Storm said in a statement. Memories “could 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 the study, Storm and his colleagues gave people a word list, where the words all had a relation to each other (example: a list of birds). Then, they had to remember half of the birds that were on the list.

By doing this, Storm said, “that’s going to make you forget the other half of the birds in that list.” So in this case, forgetting the other half of the words on the list is a good thing.

Read the whole story: Huffington Post