I was listening to something on the radio today about how with all this electronic data available to us, more and more of our lives are documented and increasingly  we are drowning in data and memories.  We can retrieve snaps from drunken parties taken on our phones, daft emails sent in anger, old letters and goodness knows what else.  I gather that Microsoft is even funding research into this with one of their chaps literally documenting every aspect of his life, but I was far from understanding why one would want to!   However, the point that the man on the radio was making was that forgetting is an intrinsic and important aspect of the human experience and part of moving on and letting go.  Forgetting is one way of decluttering our minds.

One example of the benefits of forgetting is that one day Pythagoras was taking one of his regular walks past the local blacksmith’s workshop, he temporarily forgot that the banging sounds produced by the smith’s hammering of iron bars were “noise” – his usual reaction – and instead viewed them as “information.” He subsequently discovered that musical pitch is a function of the length of the material being struck, his first principle of mathematical physics.

Another thing is that whilst our memories naturally decay with time, we tend to assume that we have ‘20:20’ recall and that what is imprinted in our minds is automatically complete, true and accurate, which of course is never the case. 

So what was the point of the blog….. I forget!

“Learning is about more than simply acquiring new knowledge and insights; it is also crucial to unlearn old knowledge that has outlived its relevance. Thus, forgetting is probably at least as important as learning.”   Gary Ryan Blair