The Brain Science Behind Aging and Forgetting

Solomon Shereshevsky, a Russian journalist in the 1920s, was known as “The Man Who Could Not Forget.” He could effortlessly recall long lists of numbers or nonsensical information, books of poetry in languages he didn’t know, and complex scientific formulas he never learned.
But his superpower came at a price. He was burdened by irrelevant data and struggled to prioritize, filter, and forget what he no longer needed.
In his later years, desperate to purge his cluttered mind, Shereshevsky drank himself to death. His story serves as a cautionary tale about the roles of remembering and forgetting.
While we tend to vilify forgetting, everyone forgets, and forgetting plays an essential role in maintaining cognitive health throughout our lifetime, argues Lisa Genova, author of Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting. “An intelligent memory system not only remembers information,” she says, “but also actively forgets whatever is no longer useful.”

Pay attention: This is why we forget

Among people of all ages, the main cause of forgetting is failing to pay attention. If you’ve driven a familiar route and can’t recall passing landmarks or making certain turns, you’ve experienced this phenomenon.
Why didn’t you remember? Your brain was on autopilot. You never created a memory in the first place.
One of the most tragic examples of inattention concerns children left in hot cars. Each year, dozens of young parents forget their child in the back seat. Often, it’s hours later before the child is found — strapped into their car seat, dead from heat stroke.