In Case You Haven't Heard…

Abstract

Choosing to forget something might take more mental effort than trying to remember it, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin discovered through neuroimaging. These findings, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, suggest that in order to forget an unwanted experience, more attention should be focused on it, Science Daily reported March 11. This surprising result 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. “We may want to discard memories that trigger maladaptive responses, such as traumatic memories, so that we can respond to new experiences in more adaptive ways,” said Jarrod Lewis‐Peacock, the study's senior author and an assistant professor of psychology at UT Austin. Using neuroimaging to track 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 not only confirmed that humans have the ability to control what they forget, but that successful intentional forgetting required “moderate levels” of brain activity in these sensory and perceptual areas — more activity than what was required to remember.