The Forgetting Machine: Memory, Perception, and the "Jennifer Aniston Neuron"

by Rodrigo Quian Quiroga

These images—or ghosts, as they were called by Thomas Aquinas, who revisited Aristotle’s ideas in the Middle Ages—are our interpretation of reality, an interpretation that generates concepts from abstractions by eliminating details and extracting meaning.

Helmholtz argued that we do not see copies of reality, of external objects, but signs, constructions fabricated in our brains. These signs need not resemble reality; it suffices that they be reproducible. In other words, it is not necessary for the representation I make of an object to be similar to the object itself; it is enough if I get the same representation every time I see the object.

Forgetting gives us the pleasurable heartache of blurry photographs and unfinished stories, a tango that laments the sorrows of our scarce memory while acknowledging that some things are better glimpsed dimly.

This is the importance of forgetting: sweeping aside irrelevant details in order to form concepts.