Forgetting uses more brain power than remembering – ScienceDaily



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The choice to forget something may require more mental effort than trying to remember, found researchers at the University of Texas at Austin through neuroimaging .

These results, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that to forget an undesirable experience, more attention should be given to it. This surprising result extends previous research on intentional forgetfulness, focused on reducing attention to unwanted information by diverting attention from unwanted experiences or suppressing memory recovery.

"We may want to forget the memories that trigger maladaptive reactions, such as traumatic memories, in order to be able to respond to new experiences in a more adaptive way," said Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, lead author of the study. and Assistant Professor of Psychology at UT Austin. . "Decades of research have shown that we can voluntarily forget something, but the way our brain does this is always in question, once we can understand how memories are weakened and find ways to control this, we can design a treatment to help people get rid of unwanted memories. "

The memories are not static. These are dynamic constructs of the brain regularly updated, modified and reorganized by the experience. The brain constantly remembers and forgets information – and much of it happens automatically during sleep.

As a result of intentional forgetfulness, previous studies focused on locating "hotspots" of activity in brain control structures, such as the prefrontal cortex, and memory structures in the long term, such as the hippocampus. The last study focuses instead on the sensory and perceptual areas of the brain, particularly the ventral temporal cortex, and the activity patterns corresponding to the memory representations of complex visual stimuli.

"We are not looking for the source of attention in the brain, but its sight," said Lewis-Peacock, also affiliated with the Department of Neuroscience at UT Austin and at the Dell Medical School.

Using neuroimaging to track patterns of brain activity, the researchers showed a group of healthy adults images of scenes and faces, asking them to remember or "to do it." forget each image.

Their findings not only confirmed that humans have the ability to control what they forget, but that to succeed, forgetfulness required "moderate levels" of brain activity in these sensory areas and perceptual – more activity than what one had to remember.

"Moderate brain activity is essential to this forgetfulness mechanism.Too strong, it will strengthen memory, too weak, and you will not change it," said Tracy Wang, lead author of the study and fellow postdoctoral position in psychology. at UT Austin. "It is important to note that the intention to forget increases the activation of memory, and when this activation reaches the threshold of" moderate level ", it is at that time that this leads to the subsequent forgetting of this experience. "

The researchers also found that participants were more likely to forget scenes than faces, which may contain much more emotional information, researchers said.

"We are learning how these mechanisms in our brains respond to different types of information.It will take a lot of research and reproductions of this work before we understand how to exploit our ability to forget," said Lewis-Peacock, began a new study using neurofeedback to determine the degree of attention given to certain types of memories.

"This will pave the way for future studies of how we are treating, and hopefully we will get rid of those very strong and sticky emotional memories that can have a powerful impact on our health and well-being," he said. Lewis Peacock.

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