Warner Bros. StudiosScientists have discovered forgetful people actually have brilliant brains inside their absent-minded noggins.
For years, people have assumed memory is all about retaining information in the brain and collating a huge encyclopedic knowledge of useless factoids to pull out at a pub quiz.
In fact, a new study suggests that remembering reams of pop trivia nuggets actually renders you academically worse off than your forgetful friends.
Orren Jack TurnerWhy? Scientists at the University of Toronto in Canada believe that bad memory recall could mean your brain is making space for important information, like your national security number or the mathematical equations that might solve the meaning of life.
You know, the big stuff.
The team found the growth of neurons in the hippocampus – the part of the brain that deals with memory – actually promotes forgetting, in order to free up room for more important details, as well as discarding useless info, like the lyrics to Ed Sheeran’s latest ditty.
GettyAuthor of the study, Professor Blake Richards, said:
We always idealise the person who can smash a trivia game, but the point of memory is not being able to remember who won the Stanley Cup in 1972.
The point of memory is to make you an intelligent person who can make decisions given the circumstances, and an important aspect in helping you do that is being able to forget some information.
OVO SoundRichard and his co-author, Paul Frankland, wrote a paper based on their findings – which were correlated by re-examining the results of six previous scientific studies – and uncovered ample evidence that selective forgetfulness actually promotes brain activity and can be very useful.
Don’t forget to share with a mate with shit memory.
A former emo kid who talks too much about 8Chan meme culture, the Kardashian Klan, and how her smartphone is probably killing her. Francesca is a Cardiff University Journalism Masters grad who has done words for BBC, ELLE, The Debrief, DAZED, an art magazine you’ve never heard of and a feminist zine which never went to print.