Forget About It!
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What is the significance of forgetting in our lives?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In Chinese mythology, Meng Po is sometimes known as the goddess of oblivion. She polices the land of the dead and has a special responsibility. She makes sure that souls on their way to being reincarnated do not remember their past lives. To ensure this, she prepares a soup with five ingredients. Her five-flavored soup of oblivion produces immediate and permanent amnesia. The soul can now proceed to be reincarnated with no memory of previous lives. There are rare occasions when spirits fail to drink the five-flavored soup, and when these souls are reincarnated, they become humans who can remember their past lives. Nearly every culture in the world has stories and legends about memory and forgetfulness. Our ability to remember long ago events is a signature accomplishment of the brain. Our inability to remember important things is an endless source of frustration. Today on the show and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, we examine the science of forgetting.
We look at why our minds hold on to some memories for a lifetime but discard others within seconds. And we answer a question many people ask themselves. Is my forgetfulness a sign that something is wrong with me? Forgetting to remember and remembering to forget. This week on Hidden Brain. In Charles Dickens' novel, Great Expectations, we are introduced to the character Miss Havisham. Many years earlier, she was jilted at the altar on her wedding day. She becomes obsessed with this moment and cannot move on from it. She surrounds herself with reminders of that day, wearing her wedding dress and keeping the clock stopped at the exact moment of her wedding. In so doing, she becomes consumed with sadness. She becomes a prisoner of her own memories.
How do memories shape our identity?
The memories we carry say a lot about who we are and how we see the world. At University College Dublin, psychologist Keira Green studies how memories are formed and the roles that both remembering and forgetting play in our lives. Keira Green, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Hi Shankar, thanks for having me.
Kira, I want to talk about something that happened to you some time ago. You live in Dublin, and it's common for people to get around by bike. You were riding your bike on the way to a piano lesson. Can you describe the day for me?
Sure. It was about three years ago and it was a rainy November night and it was dark and it was starting to rain and it was just a kind of cold, miserable night. And I was leaving work to go to my piano lesson and I was in a rush. So, you know, I rushed down the stairs and I got down to my bike and I realised I'd forgotten my helmet. So I rushed back upstairs and all the way back up through this very large building and got my helmet, went back down. So then I was running late for my lessons.
Ciara started zipping through the night to her class. The roads were slick.
I was cycling through Donnybrook, which is a kind of a busy road. And on that road, there's a lot of buses, there's a lot of cars, there's a lot of cyclists. And what there isn't on that part of the road is a bicycle lane. The bicycle lane had stopped earlier. So in fact, as I was cycling along, I was weaving around traffic and in around buses. So I was cycling on wet roads. It's going too fast. And you can probably see where this is going because I skidded on the bike and I skidded right in front of a bus, which fortunately didn't hit me. But it was one of those e-bikes and electric bikes that has, you know, the electric power in it, which means it's very heavy and the down tube is really heavy. So as I fell, my leg got caught in the down tube. and snapped my leg in half.
It's like if you could imagine a little small bunch of twigs and then you snap those twigs. They don't snap cleanly. They snap with shards. And I had this very strange experience where I, you know, I've heard of this happening before, but I'd never experienced it where I didn't feel the pain straight away. I was lying on the ground and, you know, you get that moment of shock.
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