an appointment? Maybe forgetting has had negative consequences for you and your relationships.

People that tend to remember facts and details and recall them on short notice can appear

more intelligent, and these traits are often praised and highly valued.

As we grow-up we are taught through experiences (both positive and negative) that being forgetful

is a bad thing, but scientists at the University of California Santa Cruz are asking us to

take a deeper and more scientific look into the adaptive *benefits* of forgetting.

The authors of a paper published in Psychological Science recently proposed that forgetting

allows us to re-allocate cognitive resources away from maintaining old potentially irrelevant

information and focus instead on remembering new information. This may free our brains

up to be more responsive to our environment in real time. So how do we make room for new

information without the negative consequences of forgetting our mother’s birthday? Or

the names of the new boss’s kids? (holds up iPhone) with technology of course!

The title of the recent paper says it all: "Saving-Enhanced Memory: The Benefits of Saving

on the Learning and Remembering of New Information" Our external hard drives, be they digital

records, handwritten lists, or long suffering moms and girlfriends who remember details

for us and keep us on track, function to expand our minds and allow us to hold on to information

without impairing our ability to access the full store of our working memory.

This may seem like a no-brainer, after all if you’re like me your Google calendar has

been running your life for the past few years, but now scientists are taking a deeper look

at this seemingly intuitive phenomenon. And asking specific questions about how technology

and our confidence in the “saving” process facilitates our ability to create new memories.

The nuts and bolts of the study go like this:

Researchers asked 20 college students to use a computer to open and study pairs of PDF

files (cleverly named File A and File B). Each file contained a list of 10 common nouns

and students were told that they would be tested on their ability to remember those

lists. After 20 seconds of studying File A they were asked to close the file. They then

studied File B for 20 seconds and were immediately tested on how many File B nouns they could

remember.

The key to this study is that half the students were told they could save File A to a particular

folder before opening File B. The other half of the students were simply told to close

the file. Unsurprisingly, students remembered more words from File B when they had saved

File A instead of just closing it. This implies that knowing that the information in File

A was saved somewhere, allowed them to forget that information and free up more working

memory for the list of nouns in File B.

Additional trials revealed that the perceived reliability of the saving process of File

A affected the subject’s ability to remember content from File B. When students were told

that saving File A might not work, there were no saving-related memory benefits. So we have

to have confidence in where we are saving our information in order to release that space

in our short term memory for new stuff.

The researchers conclude that “off-loading memory onto the environment in order to reduce

the extent to which currently unneeded to-be-remembered information interferes with the learning and

remembering of other information. But only if we trust the place we are storing our information.

So I guess, in a way, those smartphones and other assistants that seem like an extension

of ourselves … really are. And a trusting partnership (with technology) is allowing

us to expand our individual abilities and hopefully be smarter. After all, as Einstein

said: “The value of a college education is not

the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think”

Where do your save your “off-loaded” memory? Subscribe to D News and let us know in the

comments down below! You can also come find me on twitter at PolycrystalHD