The evolutionary benefits of being forgetful

By Sven Vanneste, Professor of Clinical Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin
Elva Arulchelvan, Lecturer in Psychology and PhD Researcher in Psychology and Neuroscience, Trinity College Dublin

Forgetting is part of our daily lives. You may walk into a room only to forget why you went in there – or perhaps someone says hi on the street and you can’t remember their name.

But why do we forget things? Is it simply a sign of memory impairment, or are there benefits?

One of the earliest findings in this area highlighted that forgetting can occur simply because the average person’s memories fade away. This comes from 19th century German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus, whose “forgetting curve” showed how most…

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