Dr Prem Global Healthcare Logo

Keeping long term memories alive not good for mental health

forgetting 2112If you are beaming in pride that you can remember every single account of your childhood incidents, don’t be. Keeping long term memories alive may not be beneficial according to research.

Absent minded people will benefit from forgetting if they have to improve their working memory. It seems that it is better to forget and remove long- term memories so that it makes it easier for the brain to filter and process short-term memories.

It was earlier believed that more the neurons were developed, people had more memory because it could store information as it was added.

A study was conducted by Columbia University Medical Center team and the researchers suppressed nuerogenesis in two independent groups of mice, and the results showed improved working memory — short term memory that maintains a limited amount of information relevant to the task at hand. The mice had to locate food within areas in a maze. Those with suppressed neurogenesis made better choices and found the food faster.

It was found that people with working memory had fewer new neurons being developed in their hippocampus; that’s the part of the brain involved in creating memories. Putting it simple words, since there are fewer neurons, all the useless information and memories like the fights you had with your friends, the outbursts with your parents are all deleted and in the process makes way for new information to be stored.

We were surprised to find that halting neurogenesis caused an improvement of working memory, which suggests that too much memory is not always a good thing, and that forgetting is important for normal cognition and behavior

says study team member Gael Malleret.

So, what does this conclude? Oh! I just forgot….

Image

Source

Recent Articles:

Scroll to Top