Surprisingly, it seems like brains that forget minor things might be healthier than those that remember details.
Even though being forgetful could be a sign of some serious health problems, it might also be a sign of a healthier brain. The way the brain works, it records everything you hear, see, experience throughout the day, but what it chooses to remember and to forget makes are the difference.
See, to not max out on memory space, your brain filters out information and stores only what it believes is important. In that sense, a person’s brain would be considered healthier if it could differentiate between what is worth storing and what is worth dumping.
While this theory has been around for awhile, researchers at the University of Toronto believe that they know what’s up.
Published in the journal Neuron, they study focused on the growth of new neurons in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is responsible for memory. As it seemed, the purpose of the entire mechanism was to dump info rather than to store it.
“The point of memory is to make you an intelligent person who can make decisions given the circumstances, and an important aspect in helping you do that is being able to forget some information”, said lead researcher Professor Blake Richards from the University of Toronto.
So next time you seem to have forgotten something simple that you believe you should know, it’s just your brain dumping that useless piece of data for some new and important ones.
