memories are distributed across our cortex, our brains, but there are central regions of the brains that can be considered hubs, where most of the mechanics and action of memory happen

fundamentally, the management of memory requires an ability to save information into a hard drive and to retrieve it. And in essence, our brains have three regions, hubs, that are really dedicated to that function

the save function in our brain is generally localized to a structure that I think many people are starting to hear about, it’s called the hippocampus, we have two of them, they’re nestled deep in our brains, right deep in our temples

The retrieve function is more or less in the prefrontal cortex, which is right behind our foreheads.

the hard drive, as a hub, is mainly towards the back of the brain, right at the top of the skull, below it, there are a series of regions that store most of the memories that we think about when we think about memory.

when we remember something, the tips of our neurons in the posterior area grow, and therefore the connections have strengthened.

Forgetting is just the opposite; the tips wilt back down and that memory is therefore forgotten or weakened.

when it comes to our cognitive abilities, the ability to generalize information and to sort information is so fundamental to what we do, we don’t even realize it, that ability requires forgetting

imagine what life would be if everything was novel, even people you know, even apartments you know, every little change provokes novelty, which would then result in an anxious state. And that’s one of the reasons why some people with autism like to insist on sameness.

that is a part of the forgetting mechanisms and the benefit of forgetting mechanisms that I think people intuitively understand, people know that it’s not good to perseverate over emotional memories too much, ’cause that could be disabling.

in discussions with the expert and reviewing literature, the punchline is that, really one of the best ways to accelerate emotional forgetting after a trauma, is behavioral, by which I mean engaging in a socially active network right after the trauma.

socializing turns out to be the way to accelerate forgetting

no one should ever forget bad things that happened on the facts, but it is beneficial to try to turn down and let go of the emotional component.

What exposure therapy does is it overrides that by tapping into our forgetting mechanism, so you have a re-balancing of your memory, because now that event, let’s say, seeing a snake or thinking of the event during wartime is now being associated with something that’s benign. And that is a great example of why normal forgetting is required at the molecular level.

“ressentiment” as a thing unto itself, which is at the core of human suffering, and it’s very much linked into this idea that your emotional memories are just burning too hot, you’re looping on these memories.

one of the reasons we sleep is to forget.

it turns out that when we sleep, all those mechanisms that result in memories in our posterior cortex wilt back down.

researchers in creativity has shown that most creative types seem to function best in the morning

ability to create unexpected associations requires forgetting. Because if your associations, your memories were stapled in steel, the kind of photographic memory we talked about earlier, there would be no looseness or play in those associations, and you would never have those eureka moments that define creativity.

one of the joys of having these interviews is, people are now coming to me with all these examples.

“Imagination is the morning of our mind and memory is its evening.” This idea that memories moor our imaginations down with detail. In order to have flights of fancy, creativity, we are benefited by not having our creativity moored by memory.

people who might have a bad memory, what we call a bad memory, tend to make better decisions.

person who can remember baseball stats or cranial nerves or anything at the tip of their tongue, that person is more likely to slip on decision-making errors because they’ve learned to over-index their memories.

In decision-making, the tortoise mind always beats the hare brain.