Having Problems Remembering Things? Your Brain May Be Working Just Fine.

Stanford researchers have found that forgetfulness is, in part, caused by the brain trying to be more efficient.

Subjects read a list of 240 related word pairs -- 40 first words x 6 second words -- and then were told to memorize a specific subset of them.

What Brice Kuhl and colleagues found was that the people who couldn't recall the nonrelevant word pairs did a better job remembering the desired ones. Furthermore, the researchers were able to see, using FMRI brain imaging, that brains that forgot the competing irrelevant memories had to work less to recall the correct word pairs. Their conclusion was that forgetting may provide benefits in the form of improved neural processing.

One problem: blocking a distracting memory makes it harder to recall the next time you need it.

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An abstract of the Nature / Neuroscience article "Decreased demands on cognitive control reveal the neural processing benefits of forgetting" is here. For more detail, also see the New York Times piece on the study.

For more on midlife memory issues, a good starting point is our interview with "Carved in Sand" author Cathryn Jakobson Ramin.