Do We Ever Forget Anything?

[00:00:00]In the late 19th century, a German psychologist named Herman Ebbinghouse locked himself in a room for months, forcing himself to memorize thousands of completely meaningless syllables. He sat alone reading lists of nonsense words, carefully timing exactly how [music] long it took for them to vanish from his head. He wanted to chart the precise speed at which a thought dies. What he would find was a steep and aggressive cliff. Within a single hour, half of the information was entirely gone. By the end of the week, only a fraction of it remained. We generally treat this rapid biological decay as a fundamental flaw in our design. The human impulse is to build monuments, to carve our names into stone, and to hoard digital archives to fight off the void. We operate under the assumption that a mind functioning [music] perfectly is one that retains everything. This fear makes more sense once you look at an average human lifespan of 29,000 days. If a person sits in an empty room and attempts to recount their existence, they might successfully summon a few hundred moments with some details. The remaining thousands of days are blurry, if not entirely blank. To the conscious mind, an overwhelming majority of life looks like a massive silent void. In the 17th century, philosopher John Luck argued that personal identity extends only as far as consciousness can reach backwards into the past. If a person cannot remember an action they committed 20 years ago, law claimed they are not the same person who committed it. But if identity is anchored so strictly to memory, then is the human experience just a progressive steady dissolution of the self in which every forgotten day becomes a piece of identity that has been permanently lost. Yet this erasure begins long before we are old enough to even notice it. Every human being undergoes a complete wiping of their earliest history. A phenomenon known as infantile amnesia where the first three or four years of existence are entirely swept away. But recent research out of Yale and Colombia suggested that this early blank slate is not a failure of storage but one of retrieval. During early development, the brain undergoes a massive explosion of neurogenesis, effectively scrambling the pathways to early memories. In a way, the brain is sacrificing them to build a functional system. This early mechanism sets the precedent for the rest of our lives. It introduces synaptic pruning, a process where microscopic cells travel along neural pathways and cut away our connections that have fallen out of use.

[00:03:02]The brain ruthlessly reclaims physical space within to optimize energy efficiency. For decades, science assumed these memories were physically destroyed, leaving nothing behind but empty space. If you couldn't remember a face or a childhood event, the assumption was that the data had been burned. In 2015, researchers at MIT would poke at this same assumption through the study of engrams, which are the physical and chemical traces of memory left in the brain tissue. By isolating specific neural clusters in mice and tagging them with light sensitive proteins, scientists used blue laser light to manually activate memories that had been completely lost to normal decay and neurological disease. The mice suddenly recalled behaviors they had seemingly forgotten.

[00:03:55]The study revealed that the physical architecture of the past remains entirely intact, meaning the memories themselves were never deleted. The brain simply dismantles the road that led to them. A river rushing through a landscape cuts [music] deep grooves into the bedrock over thousands of years.

[00:04:14]Eventually, the climate shifts, the water evaporates entirely, and the current ceases to exist, but the remaining canyon holds the permanent geometric shape of that vanished pressure. Human psychology mirrors this topography. A frustrating or humiliating childhood eventually fades from conscious retrieval, taking the faces and the words with it. Yet decades later, standing before a crowd triggers an involuntarily suffocating spike of cortisol. These forgotten interactions train the nervous system how to interpret danger and navigate social spaces. But if we are constructed from the sediment of things we can no longer retrieve, can we trust the validity of the things we actually have access to?

[00:05:04]For a century, the scientific consensus was that a memory once formed was consolidated into long-term storage, like a book being placed on a library shelf until the work of multiple researchers and neuroscientists shifted the entire understanding of the mind.

[00:05:22]The theory of reconsolidation demonstrated that every time a memory is recalled, it becomes unstable again. It is pulled from this long-term storage and being placed into temporary working memory and rewritten during this brief window of vulnerability. The memory is altered again by current emotions, recent biases, and external suggestions.

[00:05:47]When it's saved back down, the original is overwritten. We never retrieve the original experience. We only ever remember the last time we remembered it.

[00:05:57]Over [music] decades, a cherished memory becomes a copy of a copy, drifting further and further from the truth. This vulnerability gives rise to the phantom memory, where entirely false events can be seamlessly woven into a person's history through simple suggestion. But we've always fought against this unreliability.

[00:06:19]We constantly wish for a perfect uncorrupted memory, completely unaware of what that perfection actually entails.

[00:06:28]In 1942, Ho Lewis Bohees wrote a short story called Fumes the Memorous detailing a young man who falls from a horse and wakes up with a curse of unfailing perception. Fun could not only remember every leaf on every tree he had ever seen, but the time he had seen it and the exact shape of the clouds in the sky at that precise second. Bores wrote that fumes was virtually incapable of thought because [music] to think is to forget differences, to generalize and to abstract. In a mind where everything is present, nothing can be understood. Fun was effectively crushed by the weight of his [music] own perception. This fiction was mirrored in reality by the Russian journalist Solomon Shareski. In the 1920s, Solomon sat through a complex morning briefing [music] without taking a single note. When reprimmended by his editor for his apparent laziness, Solomon responded by repeating [music] the entire meeting, repeating every sentence, inflection, and detail flawlessly. He genuinely had believed up to that point that everyone could do the same. A 30-year clinical study initiated by neurossychologist Alexander Lura would reveal the reality of Solomon's condition. His brain lacked the capacity for memory decay. He possessed an intense form of senesthesia where every sensory input bled into the other. A sound had a distinct weight and color, and a number had a specific texture and personality. He could memorize a matrix of 70 random numbers and reproduce [music] it flawlessly 15 years later. He remembered the clothing of strangers he passed on a train 40 years prior.

[00:08:20]Hearing about him, you might naturally feel something like envy. You would think of all the things you would accomplish with such a gift if you would call it that. to have everything still accessible would seem like a correction of something missing. But his life suggested otherwise. It was this preservation that destroyed his ability to function in the world. He could not hold down a conventional job, read a novel, or maintain a coherent conversation. The use of a simple noun like water would instantly flood his consciousness with images of every river he had ever seen, every glass he had ever drank from, and every puddle he had ever stepped in. He was also entirely suffocated by his own history. He spent his final years writing memories on slips of paper and burning them in a fireplace, desperately hoping the physical destruction of the ink would signal his brain to let the data go.

[00:09:19]Perhaps it is why Frederick Nze argued that forgetting is an active positive faculty of suppression. In his essay, he talks of animals grazing in a field entirely unbburdened by the past, existing purely in the present moment.

[00:09:36]Man on the other hand drags the weight of his entire history behind him. Nze claimed that a person who cannot forget is like [music] a person forced to live without sleep. If we were forced to carry the exact emotional weight of every betrayal, every loss and every failure with the same intensity as the day they happened, [music] any action would become impossible. The mind requires an active act [music] of suppression to clear the desk for immediate survival. Forgiveness itself relies entirely on the fading of the original wound. If the sharp sting of an insult remained permanently fresh, society would fracture under [music] the weight of endless unyielding grudges.

[00:10:20]This makes the modern era entirely unprecedented. We have built an external nervous system that completely lacks the active forgetting force NA praised. Hard drive, servers, and digital footprints function exactly like Solomon's tormented mind. [music] Our mistakes and outdated opinions are still perfectly kept, fully searchable, and completely devoid of their original context. It creates a culture where growth is difficult to prove because the archive constantly reminds you who you were yesterday every day. But the human mind requires the steady work of a razor to maintain sanity. The fading of the past serves as the mechanical buffer that prevents the present from being damaged by the weight of history. [music] The things that slip through our fingers are not lost. They are mostly out of the way. Forgetting acts as the boundary that allows us to move forward. Proving that true memory relies just as much on what we discard as what we keep. After all, a map drawn at the exact scale of the terrain it represents becomes impossible to [music] navigate.