Myth: We always remember important things

Myth

Natural mechanisms for selecting important memories are good enough. We do not need a crutch. The evolution produced an effective forgetting mechanism that frees our memory from space-consuming and perhaps irrelevant garbage. This mechanism proved efficient enough to build the amazing human civilization. Consequently, many believe that there cannot be much room for improvement.

Fact

The forgetting mechanism was built over millions of years in abstraction of human wishes and decisions. It only spares memories that are applicable, coherent and used frequently enough. These days, we advanced to deciding on our own which knowledge is important and which is not. A single peek into a dictionary may often take more time than the lifetime time cost of refreshing the same word in SuperMemo. This is just the least spectacular example. Human history is rich in monumental errors coming from ignorance. NASA's confusion of imperial and metric units cost a lost Mars probe. Confusion of comma with a dot in Fortran, cost a Venus probe. Errors in English communication caused many aerial and maritime catastrophes. A piece of knowledge in surgeon's mind may be worth the life of his patient. Forgetting is too precarious to leave mission-critical knowledge to forgetful memory. SuperMemo puts you in the driver's seat. You can decide what your remember and what you forget. For more see: Myth: Memorization is not needed and Myth: We are good at remembering important things

Myth busting is an important mission at SuperMemo Guru. We tackle myths about memory, learning, creativity, SuperMemo, and incremental reading. Please write if you want a myth busted or if you disagree