The Surprising Reason We Forget Things

Is your doctor taking this into account rather than immediately assigning blame to the stroke?
https://www.yahoo.com/health/the-surprising-reason-we-forget-things-plus-4-113786221842.html

Forgetting certain memories while remembering others may be a normal part of brain function, new research shows.

In short, the very act of remembering may cause people to forget other memories that are overridden in the retrieval process, according to the study published in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Researchers from the University of Birmingham and the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences unit in Cambridge, England, discovered that intentional memory recall isn’t as simple as mentally reawakening a memory. In fact, the act of remembering can actually trigger the brain to forget other competing experiences that interfere with memory retrieval.

“Though there has been an emerging belief within the academic field that the brain has this inhibitory mechanism, I think a lot of people are surprised to hear that recalling memories has this darker side of making us forget others by actually suppressing them,” study co-leader Maria Wimber, PhD, says in a statement.

While there are other studies on memory interference, researchers say this is the first to isolate the adaptive forgetting mechanism in the brain. It’s this mechanism by which remembering dynamically alters the aspects of our past that remain accessible.

More at link.