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Memories make us forget

21.03.2015

Neuroscientists from the University of Cambridge came to a paradoxical conclusion: the more we try to remember something, the more we damage our memory. The experiment involved several volunteers who had to remember the pictures shown to them a little earlier. Brain activity was monitored using magnetic resonance imaging, and the researchers could accurately compare a particular memory and its characteristic pattern of brain activity.

There were several sessions of remembering, and each time it was necessary to focus on a specific image, the memory of which became brighter and brighter. At the same time, however, memory for other things was weakening: in a paper in Nature Neuroscience, the authors describe how the recall activity of the cerebral cortex suppressed other activity that supported the memory of irrelevant images. In other words, when we try to remember something, we always forget something.

This can be visualized on the example of a computer: for example, as if we, regularly opening the "Documents" folder, at some point discovered that the "Photos" folder, which we opened much less frequently, had disappeared. Fortunately, this does not happen in a computer, but in our memory it does: one of its cells competitively suppresses the activity of another.

You should not see here only an evolutionary lack of the brain: memory optimization allows you to get rid of unnecessary or bad memories that can give us nothing but stress. On the other hand, we must be very careful about what we "remember exactly" and "do not remember exactly": what we remember most often displaces something that we do not need at the moment - and this process has a well-defined neurobiological mechanism. Probably, that's why you shouldn't get involved in learning one particularly difficult question before the exam - you run the risk of forgetting even what you seemed to know well.

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