TRANSIENCE
SARAH WILD: Why we forget things: the brain’s master plan
There seems so much more to remember nowadays — and thus, naturally, more to forget. The internet is full of useful snippets to fill up our brains, and then there’s social media forcing us to remember the name, face and associated memories of people we met once a decade ago. This has been my theory and excuse for many years. But research from the University of Toronto has found it might not be our fault if we become more forgetful; it is our brain helping us to forget in order to improve decision-making. I’m suspicious of research telling me exactly what I want to hear. In 2014, a study "found" chocolate made you lose weight — music to the ears of chocolate lovers around the world. It sounded too good to be true, and it was. It was a journalist publishing a paper that had not been peer reviewed to show how easy it was to get false research into the media.This latest research about forgetting makes sense though, and has been published in a peer-reviewed journal, Neuron. The brain nee...
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