What if forgetting isn’t a failure but an essential feature of your brain’s design? For decades, we’ve been taught to fear memory lapses misplacing keys, blanking on names, or struggling to recall a ...

Neuroscientists today report the first results from experimental tests designed to explore the idea that "forgetting" might not be a bad thing, and that it may represent a form of learning—and outline ...

We create countless memories as we live our lives but many of these we forget. Why? Counter to the general assumption that memories simply decay with time, ‘forgetting’ might not be a bad thing – that ...

Traditionally, forgetting names, skills, events or information is often thought of as purely negative — a passive decay. However unintuitive it may seem, research suggests that forgetting plays a ...

There are clear, practical benefits to forgetting, especially with outdated information—where you parked your car yesterday, an old password you no longer use, the PIN code you replaced, the details ...

Dr. Small is the director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University and the author of the book “Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering.” This article is part of Times ...

There is a robust market for books that praise our seemingly feeble habits of mind. Authors have lately offered empirical support for the benefits of everything from swearing to grumpiness. Now Scott ...

Forgetting names, faces, or events is a universal human experience; even those who see their minds as steel traps struggle with memory lapses from time to time. Most consider these mental slip-ups to ...