The Gift of a Fugitive Memory A great opinion piece by Zach Wise of the New York Times.
We promise the people we love that they’ll never, ever leave our thoughts. But it might be better if they did. We try to file every last detail of our mistakes into some mental archive, lest we repeat them. But that can be a self-punishing trap, restraining us from important risks. That’s the moral of “Forgetting,” a new bookby the Columbia University neurologist Scott Small, who argues that what we don’t remember is as crucial as what we do and that the disappearance or absence of memories can be as much a solution as a problem. To recall too much too well is to leave too little mental space for new information, new impressions, new ideas. Continue reading the main story If you can’t let go of certain particulars, Small explains, you can’t divine larger patterns. If you can’t shake off the pains of yesterday, you can’t be open to the possible joys of tomorrow. Small’s argument is that we’re wired to forget, which is an adaptive strategy, an evolutionary bequest, the best way to tame the bedlam of our emotions and filter the caprices of the world. And he makes his case not just with accessible prose but also with a raft of scientific studies. He’s not theorizing — not for the most part. He’s synthesizing what we reliably know and conceptualizing it in fresh terms. I was fascinated, even though I had to skim the weedier anatomical and neurobiological parts. That’s partly because he reframes established experiences in a manner that makes such exquisite sense. He casts post-traumatic stress disorder as a case of remembering run amok — as a failure of forgetting. He describes autism, too, as a forgetting malfunction: People with autism have memories too glued to established routines and familiar faces. If they could loosen their tethers to the past, they could better march into the future. Small doesn’t romanticize forgetting. He’s necessarily careful to distinguish useful forgetting from Alzheimer’s disease and other kinds of dementia. And he stresses that he’s not giving remembering short shrift. The key to thriving — and sometimes even surviving — is forgetting and remembering in healthy proportion, so that you learn what you should and shrug off what you must. It’s ideally a balance, like just about everything else in these lives of ours that’s good and prudent and true.
