Forgetting

You can't talk about remembering without mentioning its counterpart. It seems that as much as we do remember, we forget even more. Forgetting isn't really all that bad, and is in actuality, a pretty natural phenomenon. Imagine if you remembered every minute detail of every minute or every hour, of every day during your entire life, no matter how good, bad, or insignificant. Now imagine trying to sift through it all for the important stuff like where you left your keys.

There are many reasons we forget things and often these reasons overlap. Some information never makes it to LTM(Long Term Memory). Other times, the information gets there, but is lost before it can attach itself to our LTM. Other reasons include decay, which means that information that is not used for an extended period of time decays or fades away over time. It is possible that we are physiologically preprogrammed to eventually erase data that no longer appears pertinent to us.

Failing to remember something doesn't mean the information is gone forever though. Sometimes the information is there but for various reasons we can�t access it. This could be caused by distractions going on around us or possibly due to an error of association (e.g., believing something about the data which is not correct causing you to attempt to retrieve information that is not there). There is also the phenomenon of repression, which means that we purposefully (albeit subconsciously) push a memory out of reach because we do not want to remember the associated feelings. This is often sited in cases where adults 'forget' incidences of sexual abuse when they were children. And finally, amnesia, which can be psychological or physiological in origin.