More Brain Power Is Used In Forgetting Than In Remembering

It takes more mental effort to choose to forget something than trying to remember it. This is research which is done by the researchers of The University of Texas at Austin. They discovered this with the help of neuroimaging.

These findings are published in the Journal of Neuroscience and they suggest that in order to forget an unwanted experience, it needs more attention and focus. This result is quite surprising and it extends prior research on intentional forgetting, which focused on reducing attention to the unwanted information through redirecting attention away from unwanted experiences or suppressing the memory's retrieval. Jarrod Lewis-Peacock, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of psychology at UT Austin said that they may want to discard memories which trigger maladaptive responses, like traumatic memories, so that they can respond to new experiences in more adaptive ways. He added that eras of research have reflected that they have the capability to voluntarily forget something, but how their brains do that is still being questioned. Once they can figure out how memories are weakened and devise ways to control the same, they can design treatment for helping people rid themselves of unwanted memories.

Memories are dynamic constructions of the brain which regularly get updated, modified and reorganized with the help of different experiences. The brain is continuously remembering and forgetting information and much of this happens automatically when we are sleeping. When it comes to forgetting intentionally, earlier studies aimed at locating "hotspots" of activity in the control structures of the brain, such as the prefrontal cortex, and long-term memory structures, like the hippocampus. The latest study, however, focuses on the sensory and perceptual regions of the brain, specifically the ventral temporal cortex, and the patterns of activity there which correspond to memory representations of complex visual stimuli. Lewis-Peacock said that they are looking not at the source of attention in the brain, but the sight of it. Using neuroimaging for tracking patterns of brain activity, the researchers showed a group of healthy adults images of scenes and faces, instructing them to either remember or forget each image. Their findings have not only confirmed that human beings have the capability to control what they forget, but that successful intentional forgetting is required "moderate levels" of brain activity in these sensory and perceptual areas -- more activity than what was needed to remember.

Tracy Wang, lead author of the study and a psychology postdoctoral fellow at UT Austin said that a moderate level of brain activity is critical to this forgetting mechanism. If it is very strong then it will strengthen the memory, if it is very weak then you won't modify it. The important thing is the intention to forget which increases the activation of the memory, and when this activation hits the 'moderate level' sweet spot, that's when it leads to later forgetting of that experience.

By: Preeti Narula

Content: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/03/190311152729.htm