How can you actively forget unwanted memories? What’s the connection between forgetting and maintaining a healthy brain?
In her book Remember, Lisa Genova explores how to forget as an essential part of brain health and memory formation. She outlines specific strategies for intentionally forgetting information at different stages of memory processing, from avoiding initial encoding to replacing established muscle memories.
Keep reading to discover practical techniques for clearing your mind of unwanted information and making space for what matters most.
How to Forget
Forgetting is a key part of remembering, as it frees up space in your brain for important information. Genova shares advice on how to forget intentionally, with various strategies at three stages of the memory-formation process.
First, avoid paying attention to unwanted information in the first place, so you can refrain from encoding it. Turn your attention to something else that you would like to remember.
(Shortform note: To turn your attention away from what you don’t want to encode, you can try focusing on what’s going on around you, grounding yourself through your five senses until the unwanted stimulus is gone. You can also occupy your brain with tasks like listing words in categories, doing mental math, or reciting a poem you have memorized.)
Second, you can consciously get rid of information during the consolidation process, making a point to filter out information that you’ve encoded but don’t want to keep. (Shortform note: Genova doesn’t explain how you can consciously, selectively discard information during consolidation, but we can infer that it might help to disrupt the consolidation process by not giving your brain a break after encoding the information. Since rest is necessary for consolidation, you may be able to prevent it by avoiding rest for a few hours after learning.)
However, if you’ve already encoded, consolidated, and stored information you don’t want to remember, try to avoid exposure to cues that bring to mind those unwanted memories. Genova recommends that you consciously push it out of your mind and avoid retrieving the memory as much as possible, since every retrieval strengthens the neural connections that form the memory. If you can’t avoid the cues, consciously tell your brain to forget the information associated with those cues. This can disrupt the memory formation process and act as a neural signal to delete already existing memories.
(Shortform note: One way you may push a memory out of your mind to avoid retrieving it is by distracting yourself. However, experts warn against unfocused distraction, or letting your mind drift to whatever else happens to come up. This may actually create more pathways for retrieval, as each thing you casually distract yourself with becomes associated with the memory you’re trying to avoid. Instead, they recommend focused distraction: focusing on a single, chosen memory as a consistent alternative to the unwanted memory. A particularly effective focused distraction could be thinking of something in your life that’s currently incomplete, as we’re naturally more prone to remember something incomplete than something completed.)
How to Forget Trauma
In cases of trauma, memories can be particularly difficult to get rid of. Those with post-traumatic stress disorder often find that they can’t stop reliving or replaying memories of their experiences, which prevents them from forgetting them. To cope with this, Genova recommends a therapeutic approach that involves recalling the memories and deliberately changing them—a process known as reconsolidation—making use of the brain’s malleable reconstruction process to transform them into less painful and more neutral or positive memories.
(Shortform note: While reconsolidation-based therapies appear promising for helping those with traumatic memories, evidence for its effectiveness is somewhat lacking. Experts suggest that, in order for the treatment to be effective, both declarative and implicit memories must be susceptible to reconsolidation. Research seems to support the idea that implicit memories are susceptible to reconsolidation, but more research is needed to determine whether the process can be generally applied to declarative memory.)
How to Replace Muscle Memories
Finally, in order to “forget” muscle memories, you have to replace them with new muscle memories. Here, the key is repetition. You have to do it again and again until the new memory is stronger than the old one. For example, if you taught yourself to play an instrument like a recorder, you may have picked up some incorrect techniques, like placing your right hand above your left (the correct technique is to place the left hand above the right). If you decide to move up to a woodwind instrument like a clarinet, you’ll find that the right-hand-on-top technique will prevent you from playing the instrument correctly, so you’ll need to replace the muscle memories you’ve developed with muscle memory of the correct, left-hand-on-top technique.
(Shortform note: Another reason you may want to replace old muscle memories with new ones is if you’ve learned improper form for certain physical exercises, or if an injury has led you to develop poor posture that results in chronic pain. One way to override these muscle memories is through neuromuscular therapy, which uses practices like massage and trigger points to retrain your muscle memory. However, even with the use of these therapies, repeatedly practicing the new, desired form is necessary for lasting change.)
Exercise
Consider Genova’s insights about intentional forgetting. Is there anything in your life that you’d like to forget or that takes up unnecessary mental space? What technique from the book (such as avoiding cues or consciously filtering information) could you use to help release this memory?
