The Art of Manliness - The Surprising Benefits of Forgetting

00:00:00.000 brent mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast and whenever dr

00:00:11.440 scott smalls at a social event and he tells people what he does for a living that he's a

00:00:15.100 memory scientist they inevitably tell him how much they bemoan their own lapses in memory and

00:00:19.520 frequent forgetfulness but in his new book forgetting the benefits of not remembering

00:00:23.400 scott makes the case that what we think is a problem is actually an advantage that if memory

00:00:27.920 wasn't balanced with forgetfulness life would be a nightmare scott is the director of the

00:00:32.240 alzheimer's disease research center at columbia university and he begins our conversation by

00:00:36.240 making the distinction between pathological forgetting like dementia and normal garden

00:00:40.480 variety forgetting which we all experience which is the beneficial type we then talk about how

00:00:44.460 memories are made and what happens when they fail to solidify and forget things from there we discuss

00:00:48.640 the surprising benefits of forgetting from giving us the ability to generalize to allowing us to move

00:00:52.940 on from traumatic events to enabling us to be more magnumious and relationships we also talk about

00:00:57.420 the role of sleep and forgetting and forgetting and creativity and how being forgetful might

00:01:01.580 actually make you a better decision maker and we end our conversation with how to know if you're

00:01:05.240 forgetting is normal or something you should be concerned about after the show's over check out

00:01:09.060 our show notes at aom.is forget all right scott small welcome to the show thank you thank you for

00:01:24.240 inviting me so you got a new book out called forgetting the benefits of not remembering now so for most of

00:01:30.240 human history forgetting has been seen as a problem we're always trying to remember stuff and when it

00:01:35.200 comes to conditions like dementia which you which you treat you're a scientist and neuroscientist who

00:01:40.780 helps dementia patients people with alzheimer it is a problem forgetting is a problem but in this book

00:01:46.140 you make the case that sometimes forgetting is quite healthy and beneficial when did neurologists like

00:01:53.020 yourself start to get a hunch that forgetting is actually adaptive in humans and actually not a

00:01:59.200 problem yeah you're right it's actually a new insight that really emerged in the last 10 years that could

00:02:06.480 be called the new science of forgetting and since you start by emphasizing that i do treat patients

00:02:12.200 as a neurologist with with alzheimer's and other forms of pathological forgetting i think it's good at the

00:02:18.840 get-go to emphasize that what we're talking about here is something different than that this is normal

00:02:24.120 forgetting the forgetting that we're all born with that occurs naturally yet as you point out everyone

00:02:29.940 complains about it i trained in basic science of memory and forgetting and it's always been the case that

00:02:36.360 more memory is better and forgetting should be fought tooth and nail even normal forgetting and that's

00:02:44.140 what's been corrected by the new science of forgetting that really emerged mainly in the last 10 years or

00:02:49.880 so so it's fairly recent then yeah uh okay so before we get into the benefits of forgetting i think it would

00:02:56.860 be useful to get a big picture overview of how memory works because that will help people understand the

00:03:02.640 role of forgetting in memory i think a lot of times people think that memories are just they're just

00:03:07.880 things in your brain like in a specific spot in your brain and it's kind of like that but kind of not yes it is

00:03:16.180 kind of like that and not exactly so uh you know memories are distributed across our cortex our brains but there

00:03:23.760 are central regions of the brains that can be considered hubs where most of the mechanics and action of memory

00:03:32.380 happen so what are those hubs like so let's talk let's walk through like how whenever a memory is

00:03:38.800 formed what goes on like what parts of the brain are involved in that right and uh and here i could use

00:03:45.620 an analogy which is really not a coincidence because after all computer scientists needed to solve the same

00:03:51.780 problems with how to store retrieve and encode memories in our computers as we do in our natural

00:04:00.020 computers otherwise called our brains and so one way to simplify and understand these hubs and this is

00:04:07.860 exactly the simplification i use when i teach trainees medical students neuroscientists and training

00:04:13.720 is if you think about typing something onto your screen you then onto your computer screen you then need to

00:04:21.140 save that information you do that by click save right on your app that shifts that information from your

00:04:28.280 short-term memory your screen to your long-term memory your hard drive and then if you come back tomorrow

00:04:35.620 and want to edit that document you need to then click open and retrieve that information and so fundamentally

00:04:43.440 the management of memory requires an ability to save information into a hard drive and to retrieve it

00:04:52.160 in essence our brains have three regions hubs that are really dedicated to that function and i can

00:04:59.400 list them if you thought that would be interesting yeah it would be so what are the three hubs like what's

00:05:03.560 what hubs do they go through so the save function in our brain is generally localized to a structure that i

00:05:11.120 think many people are starting to hear about it's called the hippocampus we have two of them they're

00:05:15.500 nestled deep in our brains right deep in our temples if people want to know spatially where it's located

00:05:23.160 the retrieve function is more or less in the prefrontal cortex which is right behind our foreheads and then

00:05:30.460 the hard drive as a hub is mainly towards the back of the brain right at the top of the skull below it

00:05:38.580 there are a series of regions that store most of the memories that we think about when we think about

00:05:45.480 memory obviously memory does a lot of things learning to ride a bicycle and things but when we talk about

00:05:50.300 you know thinking of a name and a face and where we were yesterday that's the hard drive where these

00:05:55.780 memories are generally stored gotcha and so it kind of walked through like say you're you want to

00:06:01.620 memorize say you're a student and you're memorizing dates for a test so what's going on there is

00:06:08.120 first you're using your prefrontal cortex maybe it's in your short-term memory and then your

00:06:13.460 hippocampus ideally would take that information save it to the posterior area that's right that's

00:06:21.220 right that's that's exactly right and then and that's why you need mainly when you're learning new

00:06:26.640 information the most important part of this blueprint the simplified blueprint is you need your hippocampus

00:06:32.660 to be firing on all cylinders so you could save that information and just think what would happen

00:06:39.140 if you would type out all the dates on your computer screen and then god forbid the lights go out the

00:06:46.180 electricity goes out you turn off your computer before you hit click save that information is gone

00:06:51.680 there's no way to retrieve it in the future we do that all the time though like we memorize things so

00:06:57.180 that we just need to know it for like three minutes and so that's what i guess it's called working

00:07:01.580 memory it's like in your prefrontal cortex it's like typing something out in a google doc but not

00:07:06.300 hitting like and you're just you just leave it on the screen but you don't hit save and then as soon

00:07:10.780 as you're done with it you just forget it because you no longer need it yeah that's that's a great

00:07:14.780 great way to describe it and it is called the working memory and i'm not sure if this is too much

00:07:19.340 information but that's why actually when people say short-term versus long-term memory it's generally

00:07:25.680 true just because of the of real life but in principle if i type something on a screen and i

00:07:32.160 walk around with that screen on for days that memory is still there but if you wanted to turn

00:07:38.000 off your computer and equivalently divert our attention to something else and then come back to

00:07:43.640 that document you need to be able to save that information in your hard drive and then when memories

00:07:50.160 are stored whether you know talking short-term or long-term in that posterior area is there something

00:07:55.600 going on with their neurons where you know they're wiring together to form that memory yeah and that's a

00:08:00.960 great way to sort of zoom in a little bit deeper if we just describe the sort of blueprint of a of how a

00:08:07.740 computer shifts information around for memory ultimately that information is stored in bits right and so

00:08:14.820 the brain has its own equivalent of bits of information and that is the tips of our neurons

00:08:21.880 and the tips of our neurons basically neurons communicate with each other they can communicate

00:08:27.840 more strongly or more weakly and the way they strengthen connections is by growing their tips much like

00:08:34.820 a good metaphor is the way trees can grow leaves or grass blades of grass grow that's very similar and

00:08:44.160 actually visually similar to what happens when we remember something the tips of our neurons in the

00:08:50.280 posterior area grow and therefore the connections have strengthened okay all right so now we know how

00:08:57.200 memory works so it goes through this process starts in the short-term memory your prefrontal cortex if

00:09:02.680 our brain decides this is we need to learn remember this for a long time the hippocampus will kind of

00:09:08.300 transfer that to the posterior area if the brain decides no you don't need to know this stuff for a long

00:09:13.400 time you just forget it so that's the process where in this process can forgetting occur right so

00:09:22.520 forgetting the the normal kind of forgetting occurs mainly in the posterior area as we described if a

00:09:30.300 memory can be defined in a very simple sense caused by the strengthening of neurons the tips grow

00:09:37.960 forgetting is just the opposite the tips wilt back down and that memory is therefore forgotten or weakened

00:09:46.580 gotcha so is this is a problem of the hippocampus like so the hippocampus is there something going on

00:09:53.540 the hippocampus that causes stuff to not get strengthened in that posterior area well is there like a transfer

00:09:59.940 problem there could be a transfer problem and and and what what we're talking about now is exactly what we do

00:10:06.040 in our clinics when someone presents to me and says i have worsening forgetting that if you can just

00:10:12.020 intuitively understand now that could be because the hippocampus didn't allow the posterior cortex

00:10:18.940 to strengthen the connections across neurons it could be because the cortex itself in the posterior area

00:10:26.660 is somehow the neurons there are sick malfunctioning or it could be because the retrieval process is

00:10:33.740 dysfunctional so right so basically that's you know when a person presents to us they they they're not

00:10:40.920 expected to know the anatomy and to say you know my hippocampus is malfunctioning they say i'm experiencing

00:10:47.040 forgetting it's on us to then try to localize the problem to what part of this diagram this memory

00:10:54.300 diagram and forgetting diagram is malfunctioning typically when we talk about normal forgetting we assume

00:11:01.640 that the hippocampus is generally okay and it's just that the cortical areas are wilting back down and

00:11:08.940 that's what results in the ultimate ability and the benefit of forgetting the ability not to remember

00:11:17.320 everything because that turns out to be a nightmare okay let's let's talk about that so let's dig into the

00:11:23.000 benefits of forgetting i think we often think it would be great to have a photographic memory where you can

00:11:28.100 remember everything that ever happened to you dates you know names you'll never miss a name and a face

00:11:33.860 you'll be able to put them together but you talk about how the writer jorge luis borges the argentinean

00:11:39.780 short fiction writer he actually speculated that having a photographic memory would create a whole host of

00:11:47.400 problems and what's interesting his speculation he wasn't a neuroscientist but his speculation is now being

00:11:53.160 confirmed by neuroscience so what are the problems of not forgetting that borges speculated would exist

00:11:59.020 one of the interesting things to me is which is perhaps not completely surprising that great

00:12:04.360 literary writers are actually neuroscientists because after all they're trying to capture the

00:12:09.920 human condition and the brain is of course central to the human condition and it's often the case not

00:12:15.100 only borges but many of the great writers sort of intuited how the brain actually works and then science

00:12:21.620 needed to come sweet come in later and try to understand the precise mechanisms for what was

00:12:27.920 described by a poet or a writer or any artist for that matter and so what borges intuited is you're

00:12:36.760 absolutely right we all sometimes secretly hope to have this super power of photographic memory i think

00:12:46.140 many of us fantasize about that power but what and borges wrote his short story called funis the

00:12:52.460 memorius by sort of setting that up by describing this this this this argentinian cowboy who falls off a

00:13:00.300 horse and wakes up with perfect memory he can remember everything he can learn latin in a few days he can

00:13:06.640 remember all of shakespeare in a few days and while you're reading it you're thinking wow wouldn't that be

00:13:12.820 wonderful right and that's the setup because then he shows that like any superpower there's a hidden

00:13:19.600 curse to that and the curse is as he described is actually something similar that some people with

00:13:26.360 autism experience and that's the inability to generalize to abstract and he says to think is to

00:13:34.920 forget and so there are some parts of the book that i think are intuitive emotional forgetting i think maybe

00:13:40.620 we'll get to that but when it comes to our cognitive abilities the ability to generalize information and

00:13:47.380 to sort information is so fundamental to what we do we don't even realize it that ability requires

00:13:55.120 forgetting and i can elaborate on that if you'd like yeah so do so it's sort of if you remember

00:14:00.660 everything in detail you're you get so focused on the trees that you forget the forest basically is

00:14:06.240 what's going on right and so the trees from the forest is a great analogy but if you just

00:14:11.980 expand on that to our daily lives right you saw someone this morning that person was seen in a

00:14:19.480 particular light shading that person might have worn different hats or makeup or facial hair in the

00:14:27.060 evening that same person appears very different your visual cortex factually see something very

00:14:33.640 different just on lighting alone but maybe different uh attire uh glasses or not and yet your brain says

00:14:43.400 that's not different that's the same person and that is the ability to generalize and that ability

00:14:49.940 computer science has taught us requires forgetting and so what back to borges he he talks about how

00:14:58.720 funis was confronted even seeing himself in the mirror in the morning and in the evening seemed novel

00:15:06.880 and different and it created such cognitive chaos such anxiety that he basically banished himself to a dim

00:15:15.680 quiet bedroom for the rest of his life well and you talk about that one of the ways that people with

00:15:22.580 you know varying degrees of autism do to cope with you know because they see the trees and not the forest

00:15:28.860 is that they'll create a routine for themselves so that things are the same i mean they don't get they

00:15:33.920 don't have that what happens to that cowboy don't won't happen to them yes and that's that's so

00:15:40.760 interesting first i'd like to emphasize brett if we're talking about autism one needs to insert a

00:15:45.460 qualifier there's a whole debate about autism is it biodiversity is it a disease is it one disorder

00:15:51.160 or many i in that chapter relied on an expert in autism to really make sure that i was getting this

00:15:57.880 right and i'm certainly sensitive to those views so but it is interesting that the that leo canner who

00:16:06.220 was the the physician who first coined the phrase autism in the 1950s writing 10 years after borges and

00:16:13.900 i'd love to know if they met because borges actually traveled through the united states i doubt it

00:16:18.700 but canner leo canner's first paper was basically autism is a problem of seeing the hole from the parts

00:16:26.300 and that is the trees from the forest issue and so if you think about the inability to if you have

00:16:34.540 no forgetting and everything is novel right that could be exciting and i describe my own experience

00:16:40.600 going to new year's eve one night in here in new york full of cacophony and chaos and it was exciting

00:16:47.560 but after a few hours it became a little bit anxiety provoking it was nice to come back to my quiet

00:16:54.000 apartment and imagine what life would be if everything was novel even people you know even apartments you

00:17:03.260 know every little change provokes novelty which would then result in in an anxious state and that's one

00:17:10.960 of the reasons why some people with autism like to insist on sameness we're gonna take a quick break

00:17:18.580 for a word from our sponsors and now back to the show all right so one first benefit of forgetting it

00:17:27.080 allows us to generalize which reduces anxiety about seeing novelty all the time all right so that's

00:17:34.120 one benefit another benefit you talk about is with maybe emotional memories and you use your own

00:17:42.660 experience as a starting off point to talk about this particularly with a ptsd so you're from israel

00:17:48.140 and like all israeli citizens you served in the military because you're required to and you actually

00:17:53.980 took part in a pretty heavy gruesome battle and you use that experience that you had as a jumping off

00:18:01.140 point to discuss how ptsd can be seen as a problem of too much memory walk us through that idea yeah so

00:18:09.760 until now we've really been talking about factual memory so faces and names those are that's facts right

00:18:16.600 we want to be able to associate a face and a name but now to get into ptsd and the emotions

00:18:22.900 we need to then insert a third domain here or another domain and that's emotions so imagine

00:18:29.120 walking down in the street and seeing a bully that you've confronted before you'll not only remember

00:18:34.720 that person's face and name but it'll also you'll also remember the previous emotionally charged

00:18:40.520 experiences and that relies on the exact same mechanisms generally the same regions of the brain

00:18:46.880 we discussed in laying down that information the face and the name and the emotional association

00:18:53.000 and so that is a part of the forgetting mechanisms and the benefit of forgetting mechanisms

00:19:01.840 that i think people intuitively understand people know that it's not good to perseverate over emotional

00:19:08.520 memories too much because that could be disabling and you're right in that chapter i start with

00:19:13.740 if we said before that autism could be debated whether it's a disorder or not there's no question

00:19:19.380 that ptsd is a disorder and there's no question that ptsd is fundamentally a disorder that is

00:19:26.460 characterized by an inability to emotionally forget normally it's a it's a disorder of too much

00:19:33.680 emotional memories emotional memories that burn too hot and i use my own experience and i'll quickly add

00:19:40.580 if you don't mind some contextualization that i had some resistance because it was such an intense

00:19:45.780 battle and because i tend not to think about it that much i didn't want this book to be too much about

00:19:51.100 me but as i was talking to the ptsd expert at columbia who was my guide through that book he said he knew

00:19:58.880 about my experience he says i wanted to write about your experience so i i resisted i i i got permission

00:20:05.020 from my military friends and i did and basically allowed me to present the interesting question

00:20:12.260 we clearly all of us in that battle clearly were exposed to emotional trauma there's just no question

00:20:18.640 about it because as you point out that particular battle was particularly gruesome and bloody uh and

00:20:24.620 yet the three of us i interviewed my friends really didn't suffer ptsd as defined by the clinicians

00:20:32.540 and so the question is well why not and why did maybe someone else in the same battle experience ptsd

00:20:38.860 and then that allowed me to not only describe the mechanisms of emotional memory how that gets gets laid

00:20:46.420 down in our brains and how we forget emotional memories normally but also talk about some mechanisms

00:20:52.220 that accelerate emotional forgetting well so what was i mean can you hit briefly on that like why do some

00:20:58.360 people get ptsd and some people don't do we have an idea yes and i'm smiling as you can probably hear

00:21:05.160 because i'm a kind of a i'm a what could be described you know a hardcore basic scientist i think of

00:21:12.280 you know disorders should be treated with with with by focusing on molecules and cells and yet in this chapter

00:21:22.280 in discussions with the expert and reviewing the literature the punchline is that really one of the

00:21:28.760 best ways to accelerate emotional forgetting after a trauma is behavioral by which i mean engaging in a

00:21:36.760 socially active network right after the trauma so it turns out the greatest risk factor for why someone

00:21:43.960 will develop ptsd is if they come back from a battle let's say and we've we've all seen these scenarios

00:21:50.120 and they're socially isolated versus someone who is ensconced by a very active and loving and friendly

00:21:58.600 and social network that socializing is turns out to be the way to accelerate forgetting and that is

00:22:07.680 linked to some of the basic mechanisms we now understand how that happens when you talk about in your own

00:22:13.160 experience you know after the battle there was a period where you and your unit were just kind of

00:22:17.360 cordoned off from everybody and you just had this period where you're just with yourself where you

00:22:22.080 could kind of i guess sounds like you kind of processed what you went through not directly it

00:22:27.120 wasn't like you were sitting down and like group therapy but in your own way you're able to process

00:22:31.440 what happened to you during the battle right and that that actually the pts the ptsd expert glommed

00:22:39.600 right onto that to illustrate what i was just saying before because we had the battle happened we were then

00:22:45.440 sent back to our unit in northern israel and we all lived together in this sort of social environment

00:22:51.360 it was very social and frankly you know we were 18 19 19 year olds we engaged in macabre humor we we

00:22:59.120 laughed and so it wasn't as if we were engaged in sort of psychodynamic therapy but by necessity given that

00:23:06.960 context we were engaged in all the socializing that the ptsd expert explained as a way to sort of

00:23:14.560 bathe out the bloody use of our emotional memories so never forget the details and that's not what i'm

00:23:22.240 arguing and no one should ever forget bad things that happen on the facts but it is beneficial to try

00:23:29.280 to turn down and let go of the emotional component and letting go is just another one of the many

00:23:35.520 colloquial terms that turns out to be forgetting we've had experts on ptsd before who've talked to

00:23:42.720 veterans particularly and one theory that i've heard i haven't seen it confirmed by any research

00:23:47.600 but it's speculation is that one of the reasons why we're seeing more ptsd amongst modern veterans is

00:23:53.760 that they can get from like the battlefield to home a lot faster you could be in afghanistan

00:24:00.560 one day and the next day you're back home going to the grocery store so there's no and like before war

00:24:06.160 was like you'd have to you'd have to march there and it'd take a long time to get back after the battle so

00:24:11.440 you'd have that time to decompress the way the nature of war today you really don't get that

00:24:17.120 decompression time you're just like well you're in the battlefield now you're civilian the next day

00:24:21.200 right and i guess it can cut both ways i think the more important part is when you come home what

00:24:26.640 happens and particularly i think during vietnam we we sadly know what happened many of these veterans

00:24:33.360 came back and they were not necessarily accepted because of the political climate they maybe went shopping as

00:24:40.800 you described but they didn't have this supportive social network of love laughter and and happiness

00:24:47.360 and that you know again i smile because these are sort of general terms i talk way too much about love

00:24:53.120 in a book for someone like me but that turns out to be the case and again we know some of the

00:24:57.520 underlying mechanisms for why that's important one treatment that we know works for ptsd but takes a

00:25:03.360 long time to do and has to be done under you know strict supervision is exposure therapy

00:25:08.160 how does exposure so exposing yourself to the thing that triggers your ptsd so if you're a veteran and

00:25:13.600 you hear a loud noise that might trigger that emotional response of there's a gun shot going off or

00:25:19.920 there's an explosive going off how does exposing yourself to that trigger over and over again dampen

00:25:26.160 the emotional memory yeah and exposure therapy is of course useful for ptsd for some obsessions

00:25:33.360 compulsions and phobias and it very much links into the new science of forgetting because if we

00:25:39.600 think back to the sort of simple view you have two neurons imagine one neuron stores the emotional

00:25:45.520 memory this is of course a simplification another neuron stores the memory of the event now every time

00:25:52.320 you think of the event there's a strengthening of that connection the emotional valence is activated and

00:25:59.840 you're disabled what exposure therapy does is it overrides that by tapping into our forgetting

00:26:06.400 mechanism so you have a rebalancing of your memory because now that event let's see you know seeing a

00:26:13.200 snake or thinking of the event during wartime is now being associated with something that's benign and

00:26:20.480 that is a great example of why normal forgetting is required at the molecular level but it'll take time

00:26:28.880 because what you're because it sounds like what you're doing is you're laying a new track for a new

00:26:32.000 connection and as you do that your brain slowly degrades the emotional connection that's right

00:26:40.480 because that emotional that that connection is no longer being strengthened and you have the wilting back

00:26:47.040 down of the original connection that wilting is exactly the forgetting mechanisms we're talking about

00:26:52.960 well let's take this over to human relations so there's been philosophers the one that comes to mind is

00:26:58.080 nietzsche who praise the virtues of forgetting for human relations because it's what allows you to

00:27:03.200 be magnamious it allows you to let resentments go have you come across any research that suggests

00:27:09.040 forgetting personal hurts can help us live flourishing lives yes and i actually thank you for for quoting

00:27:15.520 nietzsche i i love the guy nietzsche emphasized resentment so much so even though he was in french that he

00:27:21.360 apparently used the french way of saying it resentment as a thing unto itself which is at the core of human

00:27:28.960 suffering and it's very much linked into this idea that your emotional memories are just burning too hot

00:27:36.320 you're looping on these memories and a number of philosophers again have intuited this in this case

00:27:41.920 philosophers have intuited before us neuroscientists had a had to slowly catch up i think one immediate

00:27:49.200 example is when i was talking to a couples therapist recently who knows my work and now knows about

00:27:56.320 this book he said look scott if you develop you know i know you're trying to develop drugs for alzheimer's

00:28:01.200 that's great but if you ever develop a drug that will accelerate forgetting please call me because my

00:28:06.960 couples therapy practice will thrive and i think most people who've been in couples know that you need to

00:28:13.280 forget to forgive and the curse of not being able to forget well so how do you do that though so like

00:28:21.440 there's a say you have someone that hurt you you don't want to forget what they did because then you

00:28:27.200 you know it's like fool me once shame on you fool me twice shame on me type of thing is it is it you're

00:28:33.280 just trying to forget the emotional part of it that that's exactly right and and and i again would

00:28:39.520 like to emphasize and you know another example in a different chapter i talk about communal memory and

00:28:44.960 forgetting right if we need to forget to forgive an individual we also need to forget to forgive

00:28:52.480 an offending nation so amnesty right whether it's south africa or germany or anywhere else amnesty

00:29:00.160 from the latin means to forget so you need a certain amount of forgetting to forgive

00:29:06.160 communally or personally but you're absolutely right never forget 9-11 never forget the alamo

00:29:13.360 never forget the details but what you're trying to do is to turn down and let go of the resentments of

00:29:21.280 the emotional component of that memory so it's emotional forgetting that in this example is most critical

00:29:27.840 all right so forgetting emotions can be helpful to an extent you also talked about the role

00:29:34.000 forgetting plays in creativity what role does forgetting play in creativity yeah thanks for

00:29:38.400 that question because in some in some ways that's my favorite chapter and and in that case i was lucky

00:29:42.960 to have jasper johns as my guide he he's he's a friend and we've had a lot of chats about the brain

00:29:49.280 he's one of these again we talked about this earlier brett artists who really are interested in the

00:29:54.480 brain he clearly is and truly truly a smart man and so we talked a little bit about how pathological

00:30:00.880 forgetting may or may not influence creativity and we used willem de kuning a great american artist who

00:30:06.960 had dementia but still created art but that quickly led into an observation that jasper made not to me

00:30:13.680 because he's very coy about talking about the creative process but in the literature where his most famous

00:30:19.600 work the flags that he painted in the 1950s came to him in a dream and that leads into the really

00:30:26.480 interesting question of sleep and dreaming one of the great mysteries of our lives something we engage

00:30:33.200 in at least or usually a third of our lives being forced to be in a position where we're very vulnerable

00:30:40.000 to the world yet we all have to do it and when i say we all i'm not just talking about us humans but

00:30:46.080 every mammal almost every species down to flies have this daily slumberness where they're exposed

00:30:53.840 to the environment and so you know physiology can explain the need to drink water the need to eat

00:31:02.000 food for energy but it's always been a mystery about why we need to sleep and it turns out and i'm

00:31:07.280 happy to elaborate on this but i don't want to be too long-winded one of the reasons we sleep is to forget

00:31:12.960 well yeah so what happens when we sleep when we forget and how did how can that contribute to

00:31:17.040 creativity well first let me say a little bit about the evidence to support what i just said

00:31:23.520 and just as an aside bread if i get too sort of academic or long-winded please help me here

00:31:28.880 but okay the the idea that we sleep in order to forget was proposed by the great one of our great

00:31:36.160 luminaries in biology and that's francis crick so this is crick and watson the duo who

00:31:42.880 solved one of the greatest mysteries of biology and that's the genetic code right that's what

00:31:47.760 they got their nobel for in 1962 and i somewhat facetiously say well i never met francis crick

00:31:54.960 but apparently he was a true genius and he said well that was easy let's now focus on more complicated

00:32:00.320 things on consciousness and why we sleep and he published a thought-provoking paper in 1983 i believe

00:32:10.960 or 84 where he basically said we sleep in order to forget and he laid down some reasons for this

00:32:17.760 and it was simply impossible to test this empirically this really shocking idea but he spawned a whole

00:32:24.800 group of students who only in the last 10 years have been endowed with the right kind of tools and

00:32:30.880 technologies to investigate this question and it turns out that when we sleep all those mechanisms that

00:32:39.120 result in memories in our posterior cortex wilt back down so if we use the leaves of grass as a

00:32:46.640 metaphor you have this sort of trimming or mowing down of most of your memories so that has turned

00:32:51.600 out to be generally true sleep does other things of course but that has been shown to be true and then

00:32:58.480 researchers in creativity has shown that most creative types seem to function best in the morning most

00:33:06.240 creative types across the spectrum whether they're artists scientists journalists and you can define

00:33:11.520 who's creative or not have this ability to create these unexpected associations between things that

00:33:18.240 ability to create unexpected associations requires forgetting because if your associations your memories

00:33:25.760 were stapled in steel you know the kind of photographic memory we talked about earlier there would be no

00:33:31.280 looseness or play in those associations and you would never have those eureka moments that define

00:33:37.200 creativity well i know the connection between sleep and creativity there's one artist uh salvador

00:33:43.760 dolly he actually one of the things he did he did this thing called slumber with a key where he would take

00:33:50.480 an afternoon nap and then he would hold a key in his hand and place a pie pan beneath his hand and he would

00:33:59.520 doze off and as soon as you know he slept his hand would let go of the key the key would drop in the

00:34:03.840 pie pan and it would wake him up and so he's in this like in between sleep and awake state and like

00:34:09.040 he said he got like his best ideas in that between awake and a sleep state then he would just like paint

00:34:13.920 or draw whatever he was seen in his head at the time when he would when he woke up that's fascinating i

00:34:19.200 vaguely recall that there's my forgetting but i'm uh one of the joys of having these interviews is

00:34:24.480 isn't people are now coming to me with all these examples i'll look into that more more deeply if

00:34:30.240 we talk brett about how poets and artists really intuited things quickly quicker than we have emerson

00:34:37.440 the great american poet has this great line i'm not sure exactly what he meant but the line is

00:34:42.480 imagination is the morning of our mind and memory is its evening this idea that memories more our

00:34:49.520 imaginations down with detail in order to have flights of fancy creativity we are benefited by

00:34:56.640 not having our creativity moored by memory another place area where you talk about how forgetting can

00:35:02.880 be useful is decision making which this is counterintuitive because you think if you want

00:35:07.040 to make a good decision you need to know and remember as much information as possible to make

00:35:11.360 the best decision as possible but you've actually come across research says no people who

00:35:15.760 might have a bad memory what we call a bad memory tend to make better decisions what's going on there

00:35:23.440 right and in that case again i was lucky to have danny kahneman who's the nobel prize winner for

00:35:29.760 decision making as my guide and it actually there was a lot of discussion over this and in that case

00:35:35.920 one really needs to go back to the diagrams or the basic anatomy of memory we were talking about

00:35:41.360 earlier you talked about frontal cortex working memory that is certainly critical for good decision

00:35:47.360 making because you need your working memory to act like a juggler you have multiple things happening

00:35:53.040 simultaneously you need to decide what's right or wrong but on the hippocampal memory what has turned

00:35:58.800 out to be the case in some of the literature is that if you just know and we all we all vary in our

00:36:06.320 hippocampal dependent abilities more or less if someone knows just by experience they don't maybe

00:36:13.280 not know it's the hippocampus but by experience they know that they don't learn things very quickly

00:36:17.600 it takes them longer right in medical school and anything they're going to be more what's called

00:36:22.720 intellectually humble because they're not going to trust their memory as much as someone who and we all

00:36:28.000 know that person who can remember baseball stats or cranial nerves or anything at the tip of their tongue

00:36:34.000 that person is more likely to slip on decision making errors because they've learned to over index

00:36:41.200 their memories and so this idea of intellectual humility which is not meant to be a sort of

00:36:47.360 moral judgment it's just that a person who has whose hippocampus doesn't function as well as others

00:36:53.840 just learns to take their time and i use a line in the book i think where i say that the

00:36:59.440 in decision making the tortoise mind always beats the hare brain okay and yeah you use an example of

00:37:07.040 a doctor that came to you who felt like ah you know i'm having a hard time with my memory or i've

00:37:12.320 always had a hard time with memory but i seem to do he actually brought this i seem to make better

00:37:15.840 decisions than my colleagues and this is where yeah he confirmed like yeah maybe my knowing that i

00:37:22.240 don't have the best memory in the world has helped me like have that intellectual humility to

00:37:26.400 check and double check decisions so i make the best one yeah and he came to me with that with that

00:37:32.400 question and he is a world renowned infectious disease specialist so you know you would think he

00:37:37.600 needs to know a lot and he does but he decision makes slowly and you know in the book i do talk about not

00:37:47.040 every profession has the benefit of slow decision making right an er doc a fireman they need to make

00:37:55.120 fast decisions and they're you know the frontal cortex will win but if you are in a profession or

00:38:01.120 if you are in a debate or a discussion that allows you to slow down then you will ultimately make the

00:38:06.560 better decision and he describes how when a case was presented to him and his fellow students in

00:38:11.920 medical school it was always that person who had the excellent memory who can just list all the

00:38:17.520 causes of that potential disorder but then you come back two days later because by necessity you need to

00:38:23.040 order some labs and he would more typically get the final diagnosis right because he was able to

00:38:29.760 slowly think through the problem and he he felt he did it even more carefully with greater fidelity

00:38:36.160 because he never trusted his memory okay so i think by now hopefully listeners who are listening to the

00:38:42.480 podcast right now can be relieved that some forgetting is useful and beneficial shouldn't freak out if they

00:38:47.120 can't remember you know put a name with the face all the time but you know you are a doctor who

00:38:53.760 helps dementia patients how do you know if you're forgetting is drifting over to something pathological

00:39:00.080 or maladaptive like to dementia are there any signs that people should look for that might be

00:39:04.000 a signal they might they need to go visit a doctor to get it looked at yeah that's a it's a it's a great

00:39:09.120 great question also for me to emphasize that this is not a book where i'm sort of poeticizing pathology

00:39:17.600 you know there's a silver lining to a disease i i can't say that because i every day confront the

00:39:25.200 suffering of pathological forgetting whether it's alzheimer's or related disorders or even normal

00:39:30.720 aging and so again to re-emphasize there is a simple distinction between pathological forgetting

00:39:36.880 and normal forgetting the book really emphasizes normal forgetting now as a rule of thumb how does

00:39:42.560 someone know if they have pathological forgetting a simple rule of thumb is whether you notice that

00:39:48.240 your memory is worsening from your own baseline so you if you're in your 20s 30s and 40s you know

00:39:54.480 what your memory is it might not be as good as you want but that's your normal balanced memory

00:39:59.600 forgetting equilibrium if you then as you enter your 50s 60s and older notice that

00:40:06.560 your memory is worsening from that baseline that's an indicator that something pathological

00:40:12.640 is happening it doesn't mean it's alzheimer's it could just be normal aging but both of those

00:40:17.840 are categorized as pathological forgetting gotcha and then you want to go to talk to a neurologist

00:40:23.680 and this is a process like the way you describe it i thought it was really useful how you just

00:40:27.200 walk through the process it's not like someone just goes in once and then yeah you have alzheimer's it's

00:40:32.480 well we got to take a look at this over extended period of time then we can confirm whether it's

00:40:37.600 alzheimer's or not right although one day soon you know if you worry that you have diabetes you can

00:40:43.920 get a blood test now the blood test will be very informative but it's usually the case you know this

00:40:49.280 is not me defending a physician's livelihood that this idea of a robo doctor is might happen but it's

00:40:56.960 not quite there you need a test a test tells you something you need a doctor usually to put it into

00:41:02.000 context with alzheimer's we're not quite there yet brett but actually there's a lot of exciting

00:41:07.760 development in our ability to to very soon if not even now use some fluids whether it's spinal fluid or

00:41:14.720 even blood to help a doctor know whether someone has alzheimer's versus normal aging for example but

00:41:22.480 even then it's going to be very important for a doctor to really sort of localize the problem in

00:41:28.640 trying to sort through the different causes of pathological forgetting well scott this has been

00:41:33.920 a great conversation is there some place people can go to learn more about the book in your work

00:41:39.040 well my work again to emphasize is primarily on alzheimer's and aging i direct the alzheimer's

00:41:45.520 center at columbia we have a website i'm easily found on the internet i respond to all emails at

00:41:51.840 least i try to so please reach out to me i'd like to emphasize brett if you don't mind that a lot of

00:41:56.800 the research that i focus on in this book was done by my colleagues i don't really work necessarily on

00:42:02.960 normal forgetting and in the book i do have an index where i cite some of the most important papers

00:42:10.320 fantastic well scott small thanks for your time it's been a pleasure thank you great questions my

00:42:15.600 guest today was scott small he's the author of the book forgetting it's available on amazon.com

00:42:19.520 and bookstores everywhere make sure to check out our show notes at aom.is forget where you find

00:42:23.520 links to resources where you delve deeper into this topic

00:42:33.200 well that wraps up another edition of the aom podcast make sure to check out our website at

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00:43:23.360 you

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

The Surprising Benefits of Forgetting

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