The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

by Ray Kurzweil

Brain-scanning studies are also revealing mechanisms to inhibit unneeded and undesirable memories, a finding that would gratify Sigmund Freud.70 Using fMRI, Stanford University scientists asked study subjects to attempt to forget information that they had earlier memorized. During this activity, regions in the frontal cortex that have been associated with memory repression showed a high level of activity, while the hippocampus, the region normally associated with remembering, was relatively inactive. These findings “confirm the existence of an active forgetting process and establish a neurobiological model for guiding inquiry into motivated forgetting,” wrote Stanford psychology professor John Gabrieli and his colleagues. Gabrieli also commented, “The big news is that we’ve shown how the human brain blocks an unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism, and it has a biological basis. It gets you past the possibility that there’s nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory—that it was all a misunderstood fiction.”