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When bad things happen, we do not want to remember them. We try to block, resist, ignore – but we should perhaps do the opposite, say the researchers.
A new study conducted by scientists in Texas suggests that the intentional forgetting act is linked to increased brain involvement with the unwanted information in question. In other words, to forget something, you have to focus on that.
"A moderate level of brain activity is essential to this forgetfulness mechanism," says psychologist Tracy Wang of the University of Texas at Austin.
"Too strong, and it will strengthen memory, too weak, and you will not change it."
Trying to actively forget unwanted memories does not just prevent your brain from becoming overloaded.
It also allows people to experience painful experiences and emotions that they prefer not to remember, which partly explains why neuroscientists are interested in it.
"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 one of the researchers, Jarrod Lewis-Peacock.
"Decades of research have shown that we have the ability to intentionally forget something, but the way our brain does that is always in question."
Many previous research on intentional forgetfulness focused on brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and the center of the brain's memory, the hippocampus.
In the new study, the researchers monitored another part of the brain called the ventral temporal cortex, which helps us process and classify visual stimuli.
In an experiment with 24 healthy young adults, images of scenes and faces were shown to participants. They were asked to remember or forget each image.
During the experiment, the brain activity of each participant was monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines.
When the researchers examined the activity in the ventral temporal cortex, they found that the act of forgetfulness effectively uses more brain power than memory.
"Images followed by an omission instruction have resulted in higher levels of treatment in [the] ventral temporal cortex compared to those followed by a Remember instruction, "the authors write in their article.
"This acceleration of treatment has led to more forgetting, especially for items with moderate (as opposed to weak or strong) activation."
Obviously, forgetting specific images on demand in an artificial laboratory experiment is very different from passing painful or traumatic memories of events experienced in the real world.
But according to the researchers, the mechanisms at work could be the same and finding a way to activate them could be a huge benefit for people around the world who have to forget things without knowing how.
All the more so since this observation calls into question our natural intuition to suppress things; instead, we should involve more rather than less attention on unwanted information, in order to forget about them.
"It is important to note that the intention to forget increases the activation of memory," Wang said.
"When this activation reaches the focus of" moderate level ", it is at that point that we forget this experience later."
The results are reported in JNeurosci.
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