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To remember something, you need to forget something

30.12.2015

We often catch ourselves thinking that we can not cope with the huge amount of information that falls upon us. This is not only about news, pictures, texts, video and audio from social networks, news sites, etc. Even in ordinary, "non-digital" life, it happens that we just remembered why we need to go to the store , but a friend called, and after a minute of conversation, we are already at a loss standing in front of the shelves, trying to remember what we needed here. In other words, our memory sometimes demonstrates simply exceptional instability, and we would give a lot for it to be at least a little more stable - especially on holiday days.

However, according to psychologists from the University of Glasgow, we simply need to forget - otherwise it will be difficult for us to learn something else later. The experiment was as follows: a person had to learn two tasks - first it was a few simple words, and then a few simple movements (like those that we make when we dial a code on an intercom or at an ATM). Then, after 12 hours, they checked how well both tasks were learned.

The test, which was originally the first one, helped me remember the second one better. That is, if the participant in the experiment first learned the words, then later he remembered the sequence of movements better than when the movements came first. That is, the memorized information contributed to further learning, although both tasks were heterogeneous. Moreover, the effect was stronger if there was a structural affinity between the verbal test and the motion test—if, say, the sequence of words was organized in a similar way to the sequence of movements. For the learning process, it turned out to be important not specific elements - words and hand manipulations - but interconnections, interactions between them: the brain, having learned one block of interconnections, was ready to learn another.

However, the strangest result of the work is the following: the effectiveness of learning at the next stage depended on how firmly or fragilely the previous task was stuck in memory. If psychologists used techniques consolidating and reinforcing what was learned in the first task, then the next task was remembered worse. Paradoxical as it may sound, the instability of the memory helped to better cope with the new situation. For clarity, here we can present the following scheme: part of the cognitive resources of the brain during learning is engaged in obtaining and processing new information in general, in general, and part is engaged in specific meanings (in this case, words and movements). When learning, we remember both the process itself (learning to learn), and some information that we received.

Of course, you can spend all your mental power on fixing the details, but then we, roughly speaking, will forget what it means to learn. So it turns out that the shallow subject memory that we complain about, when each next piece of information displaces the previous one, is actually a guarantee that we are, in principle, able to adapt to a variety of situations and assimilate a variety of information.

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