The Future of Forgetting

A special report — by Axios ' Alison Snyder, Jessie Li, Eileen Drage O'Reilly and Kaveh Waddell — chronicles recent advances in understanding memory, what happens when it goes awry, and what might be done to maintain and even possibly manipulate it. Forgetting is currently being studied as a brain process in its own right. To be sure, psychologists have been studying forgetting for decades, including how we control our memory by substituting thoughts or by directing some attention to an unwanted memory. Now, neuroscientists are beginning to figure out how the brain forgets. "Neurons represent memories as patterns of firing between themselves in the short term," notes the article's author. Over the long term, they become etched in connections between neurons that get stronger with repeated firing. Researchers have found that memories tend to fade over time if connections between neurons weaken, or similar memories may interfere with one another.