A new study conducted by the University of Toronto is claiming that having a strong memory is a severely overrated asset and it concludes that being forgetful could actually be a benefit to your intelligence.
Professor Blake Richland, one of the publishers of the study, said:
It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that’s going to help make decisions in the real world.
We know that exercise increases the number of neurons in the hippocampus, but they’re exactly those details from your life that don’t actually matter, and that may be keeping you from making good decisions.
What information is discarded depends on the situation, according to Professor Richards:
One of the things that distinguish an environment where you're going to want to remember stuff versus an environment where you want to forget stuff is this question of how consistent the environment is and how likely things are to come back into your life.
https://www.indy100.com/article/forgetful-helps-make-smarter-decisions-study-memory-learning-8559396
For the link challenged; the UT study:
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/why-forgetting-really-important-memory-u-t-research
Professor Blake Richland, one of the publishers of the study, said:
It’s important that the brain forgets irrelevant details and instead focuses on the stuff that’s going to help make decisions in the real world.
We know that exercise increases the number of neurons in the hippocampus, but they’re exactly those details from your life that don’t actually matter, and that may be keeping you from making good decisions.
What information is discarded depends on the situation, according to Professor Richards:
One of the things that distinguish an environment where you're going to want to remember stuff versus an environment where you want to forget stuff is this question of how consistent the environment is and how likely things are to come back into your life.
https://www.indy100.com/article/forgetful-helps-make-smarter-decisions-study-memory-learning-8559396
For the link challenged; the UT study:
https://www.utoronto.ca/news/why-forgetting-really-important-memory-u-t-research