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We have all been gauged by our ability to remember things and remember them correctly, all our lives, thanks to our education system.

Here is something that will probably leave you feeling smarter about those embarrassing forgetful episodes in the past.

You will probably want to smother the two scientists who have been involved in a study and have made this statement, with love- according their investigation, “It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that’s going to help make decisions in the real world.”

Wishing your teachers in high school can read this right now? There is more from where that came from-

According to a study carried out by two researchers, Blake Richards and his colleague Paul Frankland from the University of Toronto in Canada, memory isn’t intended to help transmit the most accurate information, but in reality to preserve the most useful part of the information that can help us make smart decisions in the future.

The researchers after going through previously published papers each describing different approaches to the idea of memory, have uncovered deliberate weakening of the synaptic connections between neurons in the brain, that help encode memories. They have also

found signs of new neurons overwriting existing memories, making them harder to access.

So why is the brain acting like a corporate spy here you ask?

The scientists think it might be because of two reasons- firstly to help us make adjustments corresponding to the real world. Like if that nice merchandise store you like is now moved to a new location, the brain rewrites the memory of the old place replacing it with the address of the new one. Secondly, to allows us to generalize past events to respond better to the current ones; something in line with the concept of regularization used in Artificial

Intelligence. For instance, the brain makes up a summary combining all your previous visits to the store helping you make informed decisions on what to get next or how to behave on your next visit.

“If you’re trying to navigate the world and your brain is constantly bringing up multiple conflicting memories, that makes it harder for you to make an informed decision. We always idolize that one person who can smash a trivia game, but the point of memory is not being able to remember who won the Stanley Cup in 1972. The point of memory is to make you an intelligent person who can make decisions given the circumstances, and an important aspect in helping you do that is being able to forget some information.” Says Richards.

So the bottom line being, a certain level of forgetfulness can actually be a built-in mechanism in your brain designed to make you smarter!

In search of the perfect burger. Serial eater. In her spare time, practises her "Vader Voice". Passionate about dance. Real Weird.