xHOW TO FORGET THINGS AND BE PRODUCTIVE IN YOUR LIFE

- Harjagjit Singh Dhanjal

Michael Anderson, professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at the prestigious University of

Cambridge rightly says that “We are what we think about ourselves”. How you remember your
life post-retirement or in your old age will solely depend on all the memories you will hold of
yourself. Now, it is a known fact that as time passes, the human brain is in a continuous state of
forgetting things, but, Professor Anderson believes that we can and we should forget things
more intentionally with what he calls as motivated forgetting, and this would give you the
power of sculpting your memories.

In his book “The Power of Habit”, Charles Duhigg helps us understand that our memory relies
on the recuperation of cues. For example, say you are trying constantly not to remember the
toxic work culture that your previous company had, but then the same type of black SUV your
ex-employer drove stops right next to you at a red light. Flashes of the past flood in. So, if you
are trying to forget something, identify the cues and reshape the way your brain would
respond to them. A 1971 India-Pakistan war veteran from the Battle of Longewala might do
the best he possibly can to shun everything reminiscent of the warfare but can still be pulled
back into combat imaginary while trying to order dinner for his family at a restaurant. How
could you anticipate that a Rural Rajasthan based decor would remind him of war?

Rather than trying to reshape your brain by avoiding a cue, we must try a technique known as
“thought substitution”. If you have a bitter argument with the reporting head or manager
regarding your work and think of it every time you see him/her, try to work on positive
associations. Practice this until your brain makes you remember those better memories first
and not the fight or, you can also work on what cognitoften woive scientists call direct
suppression. You can put up a mental hand and say I do not want to think about it, Professor
Anderson states. While these mechanisms of forgetting things often work together, both of
them are different. Thought substitution relies on the left prefrontal cortex and direct
suppression of thoughts relies on the right.

One’s ability to forget is determined by an individual's neural architecture. Various scientific

studies have shown that extreme stress and lack of sleep will make you worse at motivational
forgetting. Individuals who have faced more adversities in their lives are more likely to perform
than people who have not known hardships. But, if you have lived through or faced something
traumatic it is unlikely that you are going to wipe off your brain completely. What you can do is
limit the extent to which these memories haunt you back in a controlled manner.

What

(With excerpts from the New York Times)