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The brain does not store facts, ideas, and experiences like a computer does, as a file that is clicked open, always displaying the identical image. It embeds them in networks of perceptions, facts, and thoughts, slightly different combinations of which bubble up each time.
To forget is to fail. This appears self-evident. The world is so full of absentmindedness, tuned-out teenagers, misplaced keys, and fear of creeping dementia that forgetting feels dysfunctional, or ominous. If learning is building up skills and knowledge, then forgetting is losing some of what was gained. It seems like the enemy of learning. It’s not. The truth is nearly the opposite. Of course it can be a disaster to space out on a daughter’s birthday, to forget which trail leads back to the cabin, or to draw a blank at test time. Yet there are large upsides to forgetting, too. One is that it
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the brain must suppress—forget—competing information, so that “apathetic” doesn’t leak into “apothecary,” or “penumbra” into “penultimate,” and keep any distracting trivia from bubbling to the surface, whether song lyrics, book titles, or names of movie actors.
Law of Disuse, which asserted that learned information, without continued use, decays from memory entirely—i.e., use it or lose it.
The brain doesn’t hold on to nonsense syllables for long, then, because they are nonsense
The brain holds on to only what’s relevant, useful, or interesting—or may be so in the future.
Thus, forgetting is critical to the learning of new skills and to the preservation and reacquisition of old ones.
Using memory changes memory—and for the better. Forgetting enables and deepens learning, by filtering out distracting information and by allowing some breakdown that, after reuse, drives retrieval and storage strength higher than they were originally.
The technique is called distributed learning or, more commonly, the spacing effect. People learn at least as much, and retain it much longer, when they distribute—or “space”—their study time than when they concentrate it. Mom’s right, it is better to do a little today and a little tomorrow rather than everything at once. Not just better, a lot better. Distributed learning, in certain situations, can double the amount we remember later on.
This isn’t to say that cramming is useless. The all-nighter is timetested, with a long track record of improving exam scores the next day. In terms of reliability, though, this nocturnal sprint is a little like overstuffing a cheap suitcase: the contents hold for a while, then everything falls out.
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Let go of what you feel you should be doing, all that repetitive, overscheduled, driven, focused ritual. Let go, and watch how the presumed enemies of learning—ignorance, distraction, interruption, restlessness, even quitting—can work in your favor. Learning is, after all, what you do.
