The idea that the very act of remembering can cause forgetting is surprising and could tell us more about people's capacity for selective amnesia." Our research reveals that people are more engaged than they realise in actively shaping what they remember of their lives. "People are used to thinking of forgetting as something passive. "Quite simply, the very act of remembering is a major reason why we forget, shaping our memory according to how it is used," says Professor Anderson. His group has shown how intentional recall of a past memory is more than simply reawakening it it actually leads us to forget other competing experiences that interfere with retrieval of the memory we seek. Previous work by Professor Michael Anderson at the Medical Research Council Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, showed that humans possess the ability to actively forget distracting memories, and that retrieval plays a crucial role in this process. When we come out of the supermarket and think about where we left the car, for example, we only need to recall where we parked the car today, rather than being distracted by recalling every single time we came to do our shopping. But the sheer scale of the experiences people could store in memory over our lives creates the risk of being overwhelmed with information. We need to retrieve these memories to help us carry out our daily tasks, whether remembering where we left the car in the supermarket car park or recalling the name of someone we meet in the street. The human brain is estimated to include some 86 billion neurons (or nerve cells) and as many as 150 trillion synaptic connections, making it a powerful machine for processing and storing memories.
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