Gyroscopic Investing

The next time you mislay your keys, can’t recall basic O-level history or find yourself in trouble again on your wedding anniversary, don’t blame old age — blame your brain’s evolved mechanisms for neuronal transience.

Scientists have claimed that forgetting things may not always imply you are scatterbrained. Instead, it could be crucial to coping with new challenges.

“We think an important part of being intelligent is about forgetting the details of past experiences,” Blake Richards, of the University of Toronto, said. He and a colleague argue in the journal Neuron that things you forget are as important for brain efficiency as those you remember. As a consequence, the brain actively promotes forgetting.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/forg ... -zzd6sjzc8

That's a great resource... if I can remember that it exists.

Interesting article but unfortunately it's behind a paywall.

I've always thought that the brain had a fixed storage capacity like a hard drive and when it got full that's when you started forgetting things. So it sounds like maybe there is some kind of garbage collector sorting through the memories and making room for new ones. If only you could choose which ones to discard. I have quite a few I'd be willing to submit to the trash heap.

Libertarian666 wrote:That's a great resource... if I can remember that it exists.

Wow this one is true thing here

Maddy wrote:

The next time you mislay your keys, can’t recall basic O-level history or find yourself in trouble again on your wedding anniversary, don’t blame old age — blame your brain’s evolved mechanisms for neuronal transience.

Scientists have claimed that forgetting things may not always imply you are scatterbrained. Instead, it could be crucial to coping with new challenges.

“We think an important part of being intelligent is about forgetting the details of past experiences,” Blake Richards, of the University of Toronto, said. He and a colleague argue in the journal Neuron that things you forget are as important for brain efficiency as those you remember. As a consequence, the brain actively promotes forgetting.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/forg ... -zzd6sjzc8

Indeed you are man

"Scientists have claimed"

lots of things that have not withstood the test of time. Color me skeptical.

This strikes me as a possible form of selective filtering--the thing that allows you to follow a conversation in a busy restaurant while tuning out extraneous sights and sounds. The brain appears to be constantly engaged in a process of evaluating and prioritizing information for relevance and of focusing our attention on only a small subset of the information it assimilates.

The same principle appears to the brain's cognitive processes. Ask anyone over 40 how they're faring mentally, and they're likely to despair that for every new piece of information they take in, something else drops out. It stands to reason that individuals with a greater capacity for filtering out irrelevant detail in the environment have more "brain power" to devote to the details that really matter.

It doesn't seem too great a stretch to imagine that the brain's ability to evaluate and prioritize information for purposes of directing our attention has a correlate in both short- and long-term memory. In short, you tend to remember the stuff that matters. From an evolutionary perspective, that all makes perfect sense.