Are you forgetful?

Remember that time when you sat through an entire management meeting at work with a piece of chicken stuck to your chin? Really, you’ve forgotten that? What about that time you did that really brilliant speech and discovered afterwards that your shirt had been stained with arm-pit sweat the whole time? Surely you haven’t forgotten that first date when you fell over getting out of the car? It just goes to show really that the human brain has an impressive capacity to forget things that it would rather not remember and now new research has shown two strategies, and the parts of the brain used to make them happen, that eradicate embarrassing moments and other memories.

According to a survey of 2000 Londoners commissioned by Ladbrokes, embarrassment is a very common human condition. The study showed that people feel embarrassed to greater or lesser degrees on average four times a day, that most embarrassment occurs in the workplace, that 20 per cent of people have experienced public speaking embarrassment, and 14 per cent of people have been so embarrassed at some point that they have had to run from a room. It’s a miracle that any of us can walk out the front door in the morning really and the only reason we can do it is that human beings have a powerful capacity to forget. Unwanted memories can be jettisoned, and new research has highlighted the best ways to forget those memories as well as the brain processes involved in doing it.

The study was conducted by getting subjects to learn associations between pairs of words and then asking them to forget those associations. MRI scans of the participants’ brains were taken while they performed the task. Two strategies were found to be effective at eradicating memory.

Suppressing memories was one effective strategy. In this case the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex inhibited activity in the hippocampus. The hippocampus is involved in consciously remembering past events.

The other effective strategy was to substitute the memory with another memory. When this strategy was employed, the brain parts involved were the caudal prefrontal cortex and the midventrolateral prefrontal cortex. These are two parts of the cortex involved in bringing memories into consciousness when there are other distractions present.

What is really interesting about this is that it shows that forgetting is not necessarily a passive event. So next time you forget something instead of castigating yourself, give yourself a pat on the back…parts of your cortex had to work really hard to forget that memory. Thank goodness your cortex does work hard too, because without forgetting some of the embarrassing things you do you’d be a blubbering mess in the corner.