Forgetting
The Benefits of Not Remembering
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
“Fascinating and useful . . . The distinguished memory researcher Scott A. Small explains why forgetfulness is not only normal but also beneficial.”—Walter Isaacson, bestselling author of The Code Breaker and Leonardo da Vinci
Who wouldn’t want a better memory? Dr. Scott Small has dedicated his career to understanding why memory forsakes us. As director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University, he focuses largely on patients who experience pathological forgetting, and it is in contrast to their suffering that normal forgetting, which we experience every day, appears in sharp relief.
Until recently, most everyone—memory scientists included—believed that forgetting served no purpose. But new research in psychology, neurobiology, medicine, and computer science tells a different story. Forgetting is not a failure of our minds. It’s not even a benign glitch. It is, in fact, good for us—and, alongside memory, it is a required function for our minds to work best.
Forgetting benefits our cognitive and creative abilities, emotional well-being, and even our personal and societal health. As frustrating as a typical lapse can be, it’s precisely what opens up our minds to making better decisions, experiencing joy and relationships, and flourishing artistically.
From studies of bonobos in the wild to visits with the iconic painter Jasper Johns and the renowned decision-making expert Daniel Kahneman, Small looks across disciplines to put new scientific findings into illuminating context while also revealing groundbreaking developments about Alzheimer’s disease. The next time you forget where you left your keys, remember that a little forgetting does a lot of good.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Small, director of Columbia University's Alzheimer's Disease Research Center, puts forgetting in a new light in his eye-opening and reassuring debut. While the standard view in science has been that forgetting is a malfunction of memory, Small makes a case that it "is not just normal but beneficial to our cognitive and creative abilities, to our emotional well-being, and even to societal health." Cognition, he writes, consists of "forgetting in balance with memory," and in explaining how normal forgetting is beneficial, he uses case studies from his own practice. A lively criminal defense lawyer, for example, experienced pathological forgetting, which led Small to investigate whether the issue was in the patient's hippocampus or prefrontal cortex. (Explanations of each brain region's functions accompany the case study.) Autism and PTSD are discussed as examples of an imbalance between memory and forgetting, with Small's suggestion that "emotional forgetting... frees us from the prisons of pain, anguish, and resentments." Small keeps things accessible with an easygoing prose ("among the many metaphors for memory, a personal computer is a good one") and helpful diagrams, and his passion is undeniable. This smart survey will satisfy those curious about memory, or anxious about forgetting.
