- What would happen if we didn't forget a thing?
Our brain, through our senses, approximately consumes terabytes or more of information every second. Actually, the brain is a much faster processor. With about 50 billion brain cells firing about 200 times in a second, and activating about 100 other connected neurons in this firing (hypothetical), the brain can do a raw 1 million billion calculations per second!!! However, even a fine-grained decision making process may involve all these cycles in the brain as we are only able to take quick decisions (for example, image recognition) in about an order of a second time. (This is a very naive and hypothetical analysis based on lots of unsupported assumptions)
The point is that our brain has to reject and forget most of this stuff and retain the aggregated contained knowledge in its knowledge representation mechanism. This is not a bug but a very good feature! If we didn't forget a thing, we would get slower and slower over time and not only physically decay but also mentally decay and die as very 'slow' human beings (which is actually seen in some cases with people have some brain disorders)
There are several ways we forget. But again, the point here is that can we forget intentionally? Can we learn to forget? Take for example, a fish in an aquarium. A fish, as I can 'remember' has about ~5 seconds (or milliseconds?) of memory retention time (Time to live). Then it forgets everything and again starts exploring the aquarium as if she was in some new place. How bored would the fish become if she knew that small space enclosure very well and she had to spend all time there itself!
The way these fishes permanently forget is actually different. If we can learn the way these fishes have the neuron structure and firings, we might gain some insights into the principles of forgetting. How would be just forget the things we remember to forget would be a very very interesting and challenging problem! "Did you remember to forget it?" :)
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