The Power of Forgetting (5 page)

When I say that I hold my brain to be the most important organ in my body, I really mean that—and I do all that I can to preserve its faculties. I baby my brain. You might argue
that your heart or your “soul” holds the key to life, but I would pin the secret to life on my trusty old brain. And the fact that the brain is pliable at any age makes it even more important to train and preserve it every single day. Being able to change the brain is the foundation of my work.

If there’s one defining feature to our brains that clearly sets us apart from all other species, it’s got to be our amazing ability to think. Fish, amphibians, reptiles, and birds, for instance, don’t do much “thinking.” They instead concern themselves with the everyday business of gathering food, eating, drinking, sleeping, reproducing, and defending themselves. These tasks don’t require cognitive thought at all. They are instinctual processes, so the animals’ brains are dominated by the major centers that control these automatic functions. With our “reptilian” brains built into us, we also perform these functions, which are found in remarkably similar parts of the brain.

But additional regions in our brains have evolved that allow us to do so much more than a bug or a bird. We can think with purpose and intent, form language, plan our future, pass judgment, and analyze information and stimuli in uniquely sophisticated ways.

The amazing abilities of the human mind revolve around its capacity to bombard itself with millions of bits of diverse information every single day. It must also be able to store and convert these into intelligent thoughts. It achieves this by evaluating, sorting, figuring, and redirecting information based on sequences and relationships. It discards the irrelevant bits of information and fills the blanks with pieces of information from its stored files.

Each person has about the same number of brain cells at
birth as in adulthood, but those cells grow, reaching maximum size at about age six. A newborn’s brain triples in size in the first year of life. (No wonder babies have such big heads!) After that first year, brain size doesn’t increase very much as we learn more information and pack more into our roughly three-pound brains. But what does grow larger is the number of neurons—nerve cells—and the complexity of their network. The adult brain harbors between fifteen billion and two hundred billion neurons, and the fact that we can’t know for sure exactly how many neurons the typical adult has goes to show how much we just don’t know about our brains and their capacity. So much about our brains remains a mystery.

But one thing we do know: When we exercise our brains (as you’re doing right now while concentrating on reading this), we stimulate the creation of new neurons. Every time we remember something or have a new thought—bam!—we’ve just created a new connection somewhere in our brain that boosts its overall power.

A great way to visualize this kind of activity and “growth” is to picture a brain and all of its squiggles and bits of data as represented by the stars and interconnecting lines to create networks:

Let’s pretend that this brain takes a history class. The brain then starts to look like this:

Notice that I’ve added a few more “stars” on the brain. These represent new facts or knowledge that the brain has had to retain during the class. Now look at what happens over time as more information comes in, some of which reinforces old knowledge and some of which is totally new:

Here we have many more facts (stars) to accommodate—making a more complex network—and a much stronger brain working at a higher level of power. It’s lit up with activity.

Granted, this description of how the brain works is merely a metaphor. It won’t help you pass any medical tests or win you an easy A for explaining how the brain operates from a purely biological standpoint. But the metaphor is a good one. It shows that the brain has an immense capacity to accept incoming data, reinforce old files, and upload new ones by orchestrating a brilliant interplay among its millions of neurons. The brain remains capable throughout our lifetimes of creating new neurons and forming fresh connections among those neurons, and that’s good news for us because it means that no one is stuck with a “bad” brain—anyone can improve his or her brain.

At the heart of this book is learning to use the power of forgetting to effortlessly filter out the distractions and nonessential information to focus squarely on what’s important and preserve your mental energy for all those high-energy functions. And this ability rests on developing six critical skills, which will allow you to “purify” massive amounts of data, triage your brain, and concentrate whenever and wherever you want to. This will ultimately allow you to work faster and smarter. Let’s take a quick tour of these particular skills:

One brain function that it is imperative to boost with the help of all these skills is memory. It is the cornerstone of all learning, and therefore maximizing it is a crucial part of my program. Memory is where we store knowledge and where we process knowledge. Unfortunately, many of us mistake memory for “memorizing.” We view memory as a warehouse
where we keep our knowledge when we are not using it, but that metaphor is not correct. Our memories are constantly changing as they take in fresh information and interpret it. Memory must decide what information is worth keeping and where it fits in relation to previous knowledge that is already stored. And what we store in our memories helps us process new situations. Without an active memory, you wouldn’t be able to learn.

Consider what happens as you read an article in a magazine, in a newspaper, or online. As you digest the new information, you’re no doubt utilizing information you’ve already got in your memory.

The new information can also evoke certain beliefs, values, and ideas that are unique to you and that help you interpret the information, make sense of it, and decide whether you choose to believe the new information while altering previously stored information and whether you’d like to retain this new info or just let it be forgotten. Thus, as you read the article, your memory changes by adding both new information and a new place to put that information.

At the same time, you’re also giving yourself a different way to link that new information with older, now modified information.

Learning is therefore a memory process—the result of the attempt to understand new information. And every time you use your memory, you change it.

It’s common knowledge that our memories work on two different levels: short-term memory and long-term memory. Short-term memory includes what you focus on in the moment, what holds your attention. Most people can hold only about seven items of information in short-term memory at
any given time, such as a list of seven grocery items or a seven-digit phone number. To learn information so that you can retain and recall it, you must transfer it from short-term to long-term memory. Obviously, long-term memory includes all the information that you really know and can recall. In many ways, it becomes a part of you. Once information becomes a part of your long-term memory, you have access to it for a long time. The strategies in this book will help you make the most of both your short-term and long-term memories—and put you on the road to thinking productively—adept at optimizing both kinds of memory.