The Value in Forgetting

Sometimes I forget things. And this gets me frustrated. But is it really all that bad?

As humans, we have an imperfect memory. We forget people’s names, we forget what we were supposed to be doing, we forget what we learned in school. Our brains are finite machines that have limited memory storage. We are naturally bound to our hardware — and sometimes we wish we were not.

As someone who loves to learn and grow in knowledge, I have often wished that I could overcome my humanness to learn EVERYTHING. But recently, I have become more receptive to the power of forgetting.

Forgetting can be healthy.

Oftentimes, negative experiences make a bigger impression than positive ones. Our biology is wired to make us stay alive — and stay away from the negative experiences that could kill us. Good experiences make a smaller impact, while medium experiences may never be saved in the first place.

And when you continue to save negative memories at a higher rate than positive ones, your library becomes increasingly negative over time. In the path of my own life, I do not want to continue holding on to many of my negative memories. This negativity can impact one’s present outlook on life. I sometimes attempt to re-frame these memories into a more positive light — but this requires work and a lot of practice. So sometimes, it may be healthier to let them dissolve away instead of forcing it into a learning experience.

Forgetting is efficient.

Our brains are computers, and they cannot store everything. If we forget a lesson, chances are that it is not that important to ourselves. We learn through repetition, and if something keeps occurring we will learn from it. This becomes an important lesson to store in our heads. Forgetting reduces the stress workload on our brain.

Many of my high school classmates have remarked that they have forgotten all of calculus. This is probably ok — the use cases are limited and few in their life. It becomes more important for them to remember how to do their taxes, or properly perform in their jobs. I have also forgotten parts of calculus — but the important parts that I still use today are still stored securely in my head.

Forgetting is informative.

If we treat our brain like a neural network, we attach certain weights to knowledge and experiences. Forgetting is a process of decay, the weight attached to the learning experience decreases until it reaches a value of 0 and leaves our brain.

If an experience not made a large impact on life, we naturally do not attach it to a large weight. It may not play a large role in our future decision-making. Forgetting is an informative process that moves out what we identify as unimportant — which then will allow the space for other factors to be weighed more heavily.

Recently, I have stopped trying to place large artificial weights on information through “academic” learning. When I would read books in the past, I used to stress about forcing a large weight on the lessons that the author/researcher learned. But I found this process to be stressing to my brain (which would naturally forget these lessons not learned “personally”), and slightly mis-informative to myself (the lessons of another may not equally apply to my own life).

Instead, now I bookmark these lessons in my head. I establish a node in my head with the lesson learned, with a minimal weight applied. If I am facing a decision in my future that touches on this node in the vast network, then I re-assess. I return to the learning resource, and re-learn the topic, re-assessing the weight on the node through the lens of my current experience.

I learn recognizing that I may forget — and that is ok. If I store this node and do not come across it again, I will let it leave my brain. I do not need to grasp onto this piece of knowledge too tightly.

Forgetting promotes openness and creativity.

I have often heard others say that the power of knowledge is limitless. I disagree with this. I very much believe that knowledge has its limits — and the over-reliance on knowledge can be detrimental to our decision-making.

We flock toward what we know — and tend to exhibit an overconfidence of our own knowledge base. It’s comforting to think we can fully assess or predict future outcomes. The future is the great unknown, and we would like to carry some power over it. If we have been rigorously trained in a methodology, it is comforting and easy to fall into this trained process. We can identify the exact factors that we have been trained on, run their magnitudes through the algorithm of our brain, and come to a decision.

But this decision may not be the best, and some of the most important factors in this situation may not even be included in our knowledge set. I think the much harder part — and discomforting — is recognizing what we don’t know. How do you identify a factor that you didn’t know existed? How do you pinpoint something that has no place in the map of your brain?

I believe that forgetting helps with this difficult process, as we are forced to approach the situation anew. We are forced to be open to all factors, we are forced to come to the best independent conclusion that we can draw. And we are forced to encounter all the unknown that comes with that.

Obviously, this is not saying that forgetting all knowledge is better than retaining it. That is absurd. But knowledge is but an aggregation of the learning experiences that have come before the present moment— either from our personal lives, or shared from others.

And when we let ourselves forget — we cease to become hyper fixated on the factors that we think we know and become open to what we don’t. We can reference our knowledge and expertise, but can approach the situation with the weightlessness of a beginner — and all the openness and creativity that comes with that.