Throughout life we experience painful situations and circumstances that remain in our brain in the form of memories that we cannot forget, and condition our behavior and our way of being. These painful situations can be of very different types: the death of a loved one, a heartbreak, a job failure …
But the mind is not resigned and uses various strategies to try to forget . As revealed by a study coordinated by neurologist Roland Benoit, from the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge, sometimes we try to suppress them directly. Then, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is activated, which will be responsible for inhibiting the hippocampus, a region necessary to remember past events .
The other method is to try to exchange that disturbing memory for others to replace it . Benoit observed that when a group of volunteers opted for this technique, the activation occurred in the caudal prefrontal cortex and in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex. Although these mechanisms differ, they are equally effective as a locking system. Knowledge of the structures involved in them could lead to the development of treatments for certain memory disorders.
Another study from the universities of Birmingham and Cambridge published in Nature Neuroscience exposed how they had managed to isolate the mechanisms of the brain by which we can forget and remember . Using an MRI system, brain activity was measured in a group of volunteers, who were asked to recall images they had been shown. With this technique, they were able to know at a neuronal level the memories that would be erased and those that would not. According to Michael Anderson, one of the study’s co-authors, “People are used to thinking of forgetting as passive. Our research reveals that people are more engaged than they perceive in shaping what they remember of their lives. The idea that the act of remembering can cause forgetfulness is surprising, and could tell us more about selective memory and even self-deception. “
