Some things aren’t worth remembering. Science is slowly working out how we might let that stuff go.
Whatever its other properties, memory is a reliable troublemaker, especially when navigating its stockpile of embarrassments and moral stumbles. Ten minutes into an important job interview and here come screenshots from a past disaster: the spilled latte, the painful attempt at humor. Two dates into a warming relationship and up come flashbacks of an earlier, abusive partner.
The bad timing is one thing. But why can’t those events be somehow submerged amid the brain’s many other dimming bad memories?
- NY Times
