![]() ![]() In a 2013 study, a group of young adults scored poorly in pattern separation. This suggests that depression can affect different types of memory, including declarative and autobiographical memories. People who have depression report struggling to recall particular memories. And that’s worth remembering.Share on Pinterest Studies suggest that there is a link between memory loss and depression. Regular memory failures can often be deliberately and methodically overcome, while changes in memory over time are often due to people maintaining a positive sense of self. So for most of us, forgetting things is not just normal – but desirable. The reality of remembering everything would be an overwhelming experience. One of those “super mnemonists” has described the ability as “a curse plays over and over in my mind”. They can remember what the weather was like on March 6 2016, for example, or what they had for lunch on the September 15 2004. That said, there are rare cases of people who claim to have “super memories”. ![]() It simply is not feasible to remember everything we experience. Most people’s memories fail them regularly, and this is because our minds have a limited ability to process all the information in our environment. So if I feel I love you more than yesterday, it is ultimately beneficial to feeling positive about myself – even if it is not objectively true. Instead, they found that long-term couples have a commitment to each other that is important for their own personal well being. How sleep makes the brain forget things – new research on miceĪnother interesting example of this kind of beneficial “self-editing” is where long-term couples will say to their other half: “I love you more today than yesterday.” When psychologists examined this concept, they found it not to be entirely true. I have subconsciously edited out the negative aspect to create a more positive recollection. Shutterstock/ROMSVETNIKĪnd if I remember a totally happy holiday and repress the negative incident at the airport, this actually helps me feel better about myself and my experience. (Apparently one of former US president Bill Clinton’s strengths as a charismatic politician was that he always remembered people’s names – but this certainly wouldn’t have come without a level of deliberate concentration.) Or, if I want to remember someone’s name, I ensure that on meeting them, I make an extra effort to register their face, say their name aloud, and perhaps try to associate it with someone else of the same name. It’s a simple but effective solution which requires practice (and remembering to enact): always put your keys in the same place. If I am constantly forgetting where I put my keys, I develop a routine to deal with the situation. And while memory lapses can be frustrating, there are ways around them, which can sometimes be beneficial to that sense of self. So what is memory for, and why is forgetfulness such a prevalent experience? Memory serves to give us a record of our lives, to situate us in the present and to plan for the future. Or perhaps the memory has been altered in some regard along the way, when you’re convinced something happened on a Thursday, yet all the facts point to it being a Tuesday. In other cases there is clearly a memory there, but it’s just not retrievable – such as when a name you know is on the tip of your tongue. For example, sometimes it’s clear that we simply haven’t set a proper memory down in our mind in the first place, like when we forget why we went upstairs. The various types of forgetting involve different issues. ![]()
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