This is from Economist article : Memory, Remenber, remenber.
http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21571121-new-understanding-emerging-memory-and-forgetfulness-remember-remember
The recent development of study of brain is fascinating. This article is about new understanding of memory and forgetfulness.
The memory is an evolved structure with a job to do. The job is to preserve its owner and help him or her reproduce. Perfection is not required, only adequacy.
Selective forgetting of useless and selective remembering of useful, both are important. Much of this selecting takes place during sleep, there are two paper in ‘Nature Neuroscience’.
1. Robert Stickgold of Harvard University and Matthew Walker of University of California, Berkeley.
They proposed that the process of sleep acts as a form of triage, first choosing what to retain, and then selecting how it will be retained. And they founded sleep does help people discard information they have been told to forget. The more frequently someone experiences waves of brain activity known as sleep spindles, the more his brain scraps items that it is supposed to.Rather than forget passively, then, the brain seems to shed memories actively!! Sleep also helps guide memories intended to be retained down particular paths, which means remember as the patterns not the facts.
2. Bryce Mander and Matthew Walker of University of California, Berkeley.
They compared the process in the young and the old, further into the matter of forgetting.18 people in their teens and 20s, and 15 in their 60s and 70s, were taught nonsensical word pairs, tested on immediately, and then tested again after a night’s sleep. The oldsters scored worse than the youngsters in the immediate test, which is not surprise. What was notable was that, after the sleep, oldster’s brains seems to retain even less material than youngsters’. And those who retained the least had slept less deeply.
Points.
1. Our brain selects what information do we need, and then discard the rest during sleep.
2. Sleep helps us remember as the patterns, as oppose to the facts.
3. The older are worse at immediate memory test, in addition to this, the older are worse after night sleep.
4. Bad sleep helps poor memory.
It may be that the inability to form new memories is not a bug, but a feature. However I would say.
Live the present, study today, tomorrow is too late!!