阅读理解You can relax if remembering everything is not your strong suit. Recent research makes the case that being forgetful can be a strength — in fact, selective memory can even be a sign of stronger intelligence.
Traditional research on memory has focused on the advantages of remembering everything. But looking through years of recent memory data, researchers Paul Frank and Blake Richards of the University of Toronto found that forgetting can be just as important to our decision-making as what our minds choose to remember.
Making intelligent decisions does not mean you need to have all the information at hand, it just means you need to hold onto the most valuable information. And that means clearing up space in your memory palace for the most up-to-date information on clients (客户) and situations. Our brains do this by generating new neurons (神经元) in our hippo-campus (海马体), which have the power to overwrite existing memories that are influencing our decision-making.
When we forget the names of certain clients and details about old jobs, our brain is making a choice that these details do not matter. Although too much forgetfulness can be a cause for concern, the occasional lost detail can be a sign of a perfectly healthy memory system. The researchers found that our brains further decision-making by stopping us from focusing too much on minor past details.
If you're an analyst who meets with a client weekly, your brain will recognize that this is a client whose name and story you need to remember. If this is someone you may never meet again, your brain will weigh that information accordingly.
We can get blamed for being absent-minded when we forget past events in perfect detail. These findings show us that our brains are working smarter when they aim to remember the right stories, not every story.
