The Brain Science Behind Aging and Forgetting
Are younger people smarter? Are older people wiser? Living longer affects the brain, but exactly how may surprise you
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.”
