Notemaking helps you remember - and helps you forget

Do we really need to remember everything?

This is the question posed by Lewis Hyde’s memorable book, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past 📚

He says:

“Every act of memory is an act of forgetting. The tree of memory set its roots in blood. To secure an ideal, surround it with a moat of forgetfulness. To study the self is to forget the self. In forgetting lies the liquefaction of time. The Furies bloat the present with the undigested past. “Memory and oblivion, we call that imagination.” We dream in order to forget.” ― Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past

A close-up photo of blue forget-me-not flowers

Forgetting is the essence of what makes us human

The subtitle of Joshua Foer’s book, Moonwalking with Einstein, promotes the art and science of ‘remembering everything’. Yet Foer accepts that forgetting is an essential aspect of memory. He quotes the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges:

“It is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. “To think,” Borges writes, “is to forget.” – Joshua Foer, Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Overwhelmed by memories

Foer refers here to a particular short story by Borges about Funes the Memorious, a man who forgot nothing and was overwhelmed by his memories. Not only did his remembering take as long as the actual events, but - worse - he was mired in details, unable to discount enough detail to generalize.

But Borges was hardly the first to make this observation about the importance of forgetting. Pioneering psychologist William James, for example, wrote:

“In the practical use of our intellect, forgetting is as important a function as recollecting… “Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.” – William James, 1890: 679-80. Quoted in Schooler and Hertwig. 2005.

Such views on the essential healthiness of forgetting are confirmed and extended by contemporary psychology (Schooler and Hertwig, 2005; Nørby, 2015).

Who can forget the Pied Piper?

While reading again these notes I have made about memory and forgetting, I remember an experience I had as an eight-year-old in primary school.

In the 1970s we used to listen to recorded stories through headphones and then we wrote our own responses. This was a kind of automated learning and at the time it seemed very modern. The school, which was brand new, had a small ‘audio studio’, where around six or eight children could listen to the same story at the same time.

On this particular occasion the task was to summarize in our own words the story we had just heard. I found this hard because I could remember everything that had happened. Instead of summarizing the story’s main points, I retold it in great detail. Obviously, this took much too long.

I guess we were meant to write something like:

“When the townsfolk refuse to pay the mysterious rat-catcher for his services, he punishes them by making all their children disappear”.

Instead, my attempt at a summary was practically as long as the original story. Perhaps you too recall the details of this story: the town, the rats, the piper, his clothes, the music, the fee, the refusal, the second playing of the pipe, the procession of children, the opening in the mountain, the crippled child who arrived too late and was dismayed. Everything seemed important.

I tried to put it all in

This took longer than the time allotted, so that when the school bell rang I was the only one who hadn’t finished. The teacher kept me in at playtime and I still hadn’t finished, so I had to stay in at lunchtime too. It was a traumatic experience because I just couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. In my memory the teacher never modeled the brevity I was meant to be aiming for, so it felt like I had no idea what to leave out and what to keep in.

Perhaps this memory says something about my particular mindset. Clearly not everyone had trouble summarizing the story. I was the only one who couldn’t bring myself to do it. I suppose I was a bit like Funes the Memorious, the eponymous character in that short story by Borges, who found himself cursed to forget nothing.

Setting memories down

Fortunately I have changed a bit since then, and have long been able to forget plenty without even trying¹. But this feeling has stayed with me for forty-five years - of loving the details far too much to cast them out. I’m fortunate in that, conversely, there is little in my life that I have loathed so much that I couldn’t forget it.

This anecdote brings to mind a poem by Ann Carson:

“You remember too much,
my mother said to me recently.
Why hold onto all that? And I said,
Where can I put it down?”
― Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God

So how can you put your memories down safely, so that you’ll be able to pick up in the future where you left off? I’ve written previously about the way re-reading your old notes can surprise you. That’s one of the great things about making notes now. You’re communicating with your future self, making the most of the likelihood that your future self may indeed have forgotten what you have to say and so will find it novel and unexpected.

“Reading through old notes, you may be surprised that you ever wrote this. And re-reading your work in the light of new information, you may have new flashes of inspiration or see new connections that weren’t previously visible. Or perhaps the juxtaposition of two seemingly unrelated notes will prompt you to create a third, which contains an entirely new idea. In this sense, your notes become a kind of conversation partner, reminding you of what you once thought, and even challenging you to go further.” ― writingslowly.com

References

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1964. ‘Funes the Memorious’ in Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. New York: New Directions.

Carson, Anne. 1995. Glass, Irony, and God. New York: New Directions.

Foer, Joshua. 2011. Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything. New York: Penguin.

Hyde, Lewis. 2019. A Primer for Forgetting: Getting Past the Past. Edinburgh: Canongate.

James, William. 1890. The principles of psychology (Vol. 1). New York: Holt.

Nørby, Simon. 2015. ‘Why Forget? On the Adaptive Value of Memory Loss’: Perspectives on Psychological Science, September. doi.org/10.1177/1…

Schooler, Lael J., and Ralph Hertwig. 2005. ‘How Forgetting Aids Heuristic Inference.’ Psychological Review 112 (3): 610–28. doi.org/10.1037/0…

Image credit: Photo by Karolina Kołodziejczak on Unsplash

This is my attempt at irony. ↩︎

Writing Slowly