Summary: The ability to forget what is not essential helps the brain to think better, prioritize itself, make faster and better decisions, and also be more creative.

Sometimes forgetting where the house keys are or not immediately remembering the name of that great actor who made that famous film doesn't have to scare us: a bit of oblivion, in short, not only normal but even beneficial.
Remove memories.
The latest in-depth study on this topic - which has involved several researchers in recent years - comes with Forgetting: The benefits of not remembering, the latest work by Scott Small, professor of neurology and psychiatry, who heads Columbia University's Alzheimer's Research Center in New York.
Scott Small, who struggles every day with his patients' memory lapses, explains in a simple but thorough way how, for a healthy brain, the ability to forget is as fundamental as the ability to remember.
And that removing memories is not a passive process, but an active action essential to reduce the background noise of useless information.
To learn more, read the article Scherzi della memoria, by Elena Meli, in Focus 355 (May 2022).
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The ability to forget what is not essential helps the brain to think better, prioritize itself, make faster and better decisions, and also be more creative.
In conclusion, normal forgetfulness, balanced with adequate memory, gives us a more flexible mind, explains the expert.
Hyperthymic syndrome.
Of course, it must not be confused with the pathological memory loss of someone who is slipping into dementia but, not surprisingly, also supermemory, or hyperthimesia - considered a problem.
Small concludes: Those who remember in the smallest details what they ate for lunch thirty years ago are no more able than anyone else to remember a telephone number or where they put the keys, because the iron memory is only the autobiographical one, the one on the facts of the life.
And having it is not an advantage: remembering every pain, regret, traumatic experience imprisons in a suffering existence.

From Focus