A study shows how memories can be intentionally forgotten.

Memories are not small, autonomous incidents that are flying through the mind waiting for you to come back to them. They are much more. When you decide to remember something from your past you are taking up a huge fusion between sensory and narrative details at the same time .

If an experience of a family beach day arrives in your brain , it will come, surely, accompanied by the smell of the ocean, sunscreen, a conversation between your parents, their gestures, your desire to stay always playing on the shore. .

Years later, while you are on the beach with your friends, one or two details of that childhood memory will suffice for your brain to relate them to that afternoon of the past. The most significant and important is that the context gives rise to the memories . Rather, memory is inseparable from its context .

Ed Cooke, author of Remember, Remember: Learn the Stuff You Thought You Never Could , explains that "for most students, for example, it is a chore to cram the mind of knowledge on the eve of an exam because once done our Brain is emptied of all this learning that we no longer need . After a few days, we will hardly remember what we had that exam and not even talk about the details. "

"What happens is that it seems that we have forgotten on purposeand to our surprise, it may be that it is involuntarily like this" Cooke continues. A new study by Jeremy Manning and Kenneth Norman, this question is filled with light: under the right conditions it is possible to deliberately forget things.

The experiment of Manning and Norman shows that "the way to forget a memory is to discard the mental context in which those memories were apprehended for the first time ".

The study had a specific number of people who were instructed to remember and forget some new words that they did not knowwhile teaching them some images. The researchers, while this was happening, observed the functioning of the brain.

"When the brain wants to remember the context that was present during the learning is kept active (the details of the environment: the smell, the temperature, the colors), whereas when the brain wants to forget it tries to discard that context, disguise it, leave it alone in a structure empty of content ".

Manning and Norman explain that the process is complicated, since that context has been, in turn, the key to remember and, in fact, when one visits this context " memory travels directly to what is related to it ".



Manning explains that the study opens the doors to a very important implication and that "all memory studies emphasize how we remember instead of how we forget, since forgetfulness is identified with failure .

But, without a doubt, forgetting can be beneficial . Our study has identified that the context supports us in the process of remembering, which is also the protagonist at the time of trying to forget. "

If you can not empty the context to forget a memory, move to that environment and generate a new one  - ED COOKE Co-founder of Memrise

Also, both researchers want to make clear the complexity of the study because "you can not train a computer to recognize the aspect that has the context in our brain because for each person is different and is also in constant movement and evolution ." That is the reason why images were used in the word experiment.

Until now, explains Ed Cooke, " this technique is the most powerful of all . If you can not empty the context to forget a memory, move to that environment and generate a new one. "