Status Updates From How We Learn: The Surprisin...

People walk around with an enormous storehouse of associations for all these things. … Stare long enough at a cloud and it begins to look like a dog’s head, which in turn activates hundreds of dog-related circuits in the brain. Our brain can impute meaning to almost anything.

Forgetting a huge chunk of what we’ve just learned, especially when it’s a brandnew topic, is not necessarily evidence of laziness, attention deficits, or a faultry character. On the contrary, it is a sign that the brain is working as it should.

Alert and highly focused. So focused, in fact, that they’re blocking out trivial information.

"If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill as if we remembered nothing,” William James, American Psychologist.

There are large upsides to forgetting, too. One is that it is nature’s most sophisticated spam filter. It’s what allows the brain to focus, enabling south-after facts to pop to mind.

Using our memories changes our memories.

You have changed, so has your brain, and the biology of this change is shrouded in mystery and colored by personal experience.