How to Let Go of the Past and Forgive Yourself

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, lovers erased each other's memories after breaking up. What looked like fantasy before turns out to be reality: we can really erase memories whenever we want.

Recollection is not a one-dimensional thought or idea. It is the sum of impressions from specific events in your past. You do not remember a point in time, but a lot of sensory details.

For example, if you try to remember an enjoyable day at the beach as a child, it’s not just a picture of a river that will come to mind. You will remember how warm the sand was, the smell of the wind and the taste of ice cream bought at the kiosk across the street.

Source

Any of these sensations can be a trigger. When you buy an ice cream that tastes like the one from childhood, you will be transported back to a hot day on the river beach.

Thus, memories are inseparable from context.

Context is the most important factor for someone who wants to learn how to manage their memories. After all, with its help, you can fix the memory. The wider and brighter the context, the more we remember the event.

Let's go back to the memory of a hot day on the beach. It is advisable that you remember the details, setting, emotions and feelings. Then the context will be formed.

If you remember the light flow of river water, the warm sand of the coast, the hot asphalt of the path next to your umbrella and the creamy taste of ice cream, the memory of this day will remain very vivid and full for many years. The broader the context, the more varied the experience. It is him that we revive in memory when we recall a hot day spent in childhood.

So, if we know how to use context to create a memory, can we find a way to erase our memory?

A forgetting strategy can be as follows: allow yourself to forget individual details of an event in order to destroy the memory completely.

To test this assumption, scientists conducted a study in which two groups of people took part. They had to learn words from two separate lists and simultaneously look at photographs of different landscapes to create a context for the memory.

One group was instructed to approach the task very carefully: memorize the first list of words and only then move on to the second. Subjects in the second group were asked to first learn the words and then forget them. Then the volunteers had to repeat what they remembered.

The brain activity of the participants in the experiment was studied using functional MRI. It turned out that the subjects who forgot the learned words had a much lower level of activity in the part of the brain that is responsible for image processing. This group of participants simply allowed words and images to slip from memory.

When the brain tries to memorize words, facts, images, it is constantly working to create context. When the brain tries to forget something, it initially rejects the context and abstracts from it. Therefore, the memory is created with difficulty and does not exist for long.

Source

If we return to the example with the beach, we can put it this way: in order to forget this day, you should specifically try to forget the taste of ice cream and the hot sand under your feet.

Does this method always work 100%? Of course not. To say that scientists have discovered a magical way to forget, as in the movie "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind", is impossible. We know too little about the brain and memory and cannot erase memories.

Forgetting is very helpful. We can use it to make it easier to relive a traumatic experience or painful event. Forgetting is necessary to clear the brain of unnecessary information.

In the experiment, participants memorized and forgotten simple things: words and pictures. A real memory consists of dozens of details and sensory impressions, so it is not so easy to erase it. But this exploration is the first step in the beginning of a very intriguing and alluring journey.

It looks like we can figure out how to forget unpleasant and unnecessary things. More importantly, we will learn to remember happy days and moments for a lifetime.

---