Many studies have shown that our brain, through our memories, does not show a true reflection of what actually happened to us in the past, since our memories are continually deformed and shaped. Now, a team of researchers from the universities of Birmingham and Cambridge (United Kingdom) has managed to isolate this automatic mechanism of forgetting in our brain, which “facilitates” what we should remember or not .
To achieve this, the experts used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) system to measure brain activity in a group of volunteers. They were asked to recall specific memories based on images that they had seen right at the beginning of the experiment. The test was carried out on four occasions. The results revealed the fate, on a neuronal level, of the memories that were ultimately eliminated.
And it is that the images showed how when trying to recover a specific memory, that memory gradually became more intense while other memories were fading little by little . “Although people think that forgetting is something that happens unintentionally, this research shows that people have a more relevant role than they think when deciding what to remember,” says Michael Anderson, co-author of the study that publishes the journal Nature Neuroscience .
This study shows that the repeated recall of a memory makes us forget other details and that these results are not restricted to specific types of memory, but that semantic memory, episodic memory or short-term memory are also affected by the side effect of wanting to remember. In addition, despite the fact that people are genetically different, scientists believe that all human brains are capable of inducing different degrees of this forgetting mechanism.
