Selective forgetting
June 2nd 2011 01:31
MANILA, Philippines — This summer, I read again Zorba the Greek, a classic work of Nikos Kazantzakis. After a passionate encounter with Bouboulina, an old, decrepit woman of ill-repute, Zorba exclaims: “It’s no use telling me that she’s a bit over-ripe. Yes she’s led a fast life and been on the spree with many men. But she can’t remember any of those lovers she had. So, no matter how many times men abuse her, she emerges every time a virgin. Why? Because she doesn’t remember.”
Have you ever wondered what it would be like to wake up every morning with no recollection of the previous day? Nietzsche once wrote that the proverbial contented cow is such because it has absolutely no memory of the past.
Every moment is new because the cow does not keep track of the passage of time. Unlike human beings who remember happiness as short-lived and episodic, the contented cow experiences happiness, not fearing it won’t last. If you ask the cow why it is happy, it does not respond because as soon as it hears the question, the cow forgets.
Nietzsche concludes that having a bad memory is not an affliction. It is the secret to happiness and contentment.
For sure, he does not suggest that we all contract Alzheimer disease, or live like cows. Nietzsche wants us to stop tormenting ourselves with past mistakes that we can no longer change, and fearing possibilities we cannot control.
Even scientists have put in a good word for selective forgetting. Researchers at Stanford University declared that while forgetting can be frustrating, it has some fundamental benefits for our ability to remember. Developing the brain’s ability to forget irrelevant and redundant information can help us remember what is truly important when making decisions. We often think that forgetting is passive while remembering is active. In truth, memory can either develop or decay. It is up to the brain to either reinforce the development of a memory, or hasten its decay.
Drowning in a sea of useless memories is a terrible and slow death. And yet, every day, we allow the Internet and the mass media to bombard us relentlessly with competing information and news that are mostly trash. Also we fail to focus on the happy events in our personal and collective history because we crowd these out with frustrating and disappointing occurrences the memory of which makes us cynical and perpetually miserable.
Bonnie Tyler encourages us to develop the ability for selective forgetting when she crooned: “Let’s get away from the past. It doesn’t matter what we’re losing; what only matters is what we’re going to find.”
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