Would You Forget Your Most Painful Memories If You Could?
LatestMatrix-y memory researcher Malcolm MacLeod was curious whether people might be able to improve their ability to forget embarrassing or traumatizing personal memories, so he ran some experiments on “intentional forgetting” with co-researcher Saima Noreen. Both were doubtful — “Autobiographical memory is so vivid, so rich, that it’s going to be incredibly difficult to keep from mind those sorts of events that you’ve personally experienced,” MacLeod told WYNC — but they found a significant number of their test subjects experienced a “significant forgetting effect” after trying really hard to disassociate certain memories over a period of time.
Most interesting to the researchers wasn’t the roughly 12 percent drop in the levels of details recalled, but the part of the memories that were forgotten: the icky emotional part. For example, one woman, Noreen, worked on forgetting this memory: