How not to remember things makes us think better

Irenaeus Funes was 19 when, after an accident, he lost knowledge and, when recovering it, he debuted with a very rare case of hypermnesia: Your memory It had widen in a prodigious, superlative, elephantiatic way. Now, in their drawers, the whole world and each of its details fit.

“More memories I have that those who have had all men since the world is world,” he told a Buenos Aires pack that his story kept us in A small text destined for a collective biography that never got edited. But, very soon, both began to discover that “the gift” was poisoned.

Funes began to talk about his memory as a “garbage emptying” and the writer realizes that the Uruguayan young man was so full of insignificance that he had become someone unable to think. “Thinking is forgetting differences, it is to generalize, abstract. In the crowded world of Funes there were only details, almost immediate,” wrote in 1944.

That is, Borges readers already knew that oblivion is more than necessary. Now also confirms neuroscience.

How are long -term memories saved?

I am not sure that ‘saving’ is the term more prices, but it will be worthwhile to talk about the subject today. In its most basic aspect, “long -term memories are stored as configurations of neuronal sets, called greases.”

The term “engram” is actually used for many things (with unequal rigor) because it refers to any relatively stable interconnection of neurons. Just the type of patterns we are when studying long -term memory.

A lot has been studied on the properties of these structures and the functionalities that the engrams have, but (how did they realize Some researchers from Dublin Trinity College) still know very little “about how they are affected by oblivion.”

Not only the distance is oblivion. In fact, the Irish team study How affected the ‘retroactive interference‘(A phenomenon in which different experiences that occur nearby in time can cause the oblivion of recently trained memories) to the engrams.

In an experiment with mice, The researchers created A memory, identified the ‘linked’ engram to him, made him disappear with retroactive intervention techniques and, subsequently, thanks to optogenetics, analyzed what happened to that hook.

What they discovered is that “forgotten” greases can be restored by presenting similar or related environmental information. That is, they have shown that “retroactive interference modulates the expression of the engrams in a reversible and update way.”

In a way, if we think of greases like ‘roads’ that connect certain neuronsafter oblivion those paths stop being used, but (as in the real roads) the brands remain in the “vegetation” and can be followed with some ease if necessary.

Forgetting, thus, simplifies communications networks in the brain, without destroying them at all. Something that is “adaptive” for a daily life in which “new perceptual and environmental entries” modulate oblivion). It is not a problem, no; It is a characteristic that makes us better.

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Image | Milad Fakurian

*An earlier version of this article was published in August 2023