Remember to Forget

Did you know that the brain forgets things on purpose? In other words, forgetting is an active process to remove memory. In a sense, the brain is designed to forget, to allow you focus on the types of things your brain finds interesting. Researchers and scientists have debated about the reasons people forget. One theory held that new memories are simply unstable and evaporate over time. Another that interference caused earlier short-term memories to be overridden as new information comes in. Now it appears that those competing notions are, at the molecular level at least, one and the same.