might make you forget. And that’s not a bad thing.

Hey guys, Julia here for DNews

Scientists have known for a while that humans have terrible memories. Memories can change

over time and we can even remember things that never happened. We’ve talked about

this a bunch on the show, check out some links in the description for those episodes.

We know memory sucks, but science hasn’t been sure why we forget things at all. Is

it a passive thing that just happens? Well it turns out forgetting is a pretty active

process. Your brain does it on purpose and in a couple of different ways.

New research published in the journal Nature Neuroscience found that by actively recalling

an event, related memories might be forgotten. The researchers asked participants to look

at images and to recall them several times. MRI scans reveled that as the participants

remembered the images, competing memories initially fired up too, but then became suppressed.

And that might be a good thing. That way, when I for example, talk about fine China

for a dinner party, you don’t immediately think of the country.

The researchers think maybe these new findings could “be incredibly useful when trying

to overcome a negative memory from our past”.

So forgetting might be a good thing, it actually might make us remember other memories. But

how does that happen? What’s going on in the brain? Another study published in the

journal Cell, found a specific protein that might be responsible for forgetting.

The so-called musashi protein helps build connections between neurons called synapses,

where information is passed between them. The researchers genetically modified ringworms

to not produce this protein. Both regular and modified ringworms seem to learn the same,

but over time, the musashi-less worms remembered better.

The researchers think the protein aids in forgetting by stopping the stabilization of

synaptic connections. Basically when you learn something new, new connections are made between

neurons. Some proteins make these connections strong and more stable, but this musashi protein

actively disrupts this process, making the ringworms, and maybe other animals, forgetful.

The researchers think this might help the nervous system retains its plasticity and

that if it didn’t you could develop serious mental disorders.

Another study published in the journal Neuron found that right as we form a memory we are

also forgetting it. The study looked at brains in fruit flies to see how it works. They found

that dopamine helps form a memory and helps us forget it. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter

that does a lot of things in the brain, especially with reward, pleasure and learning.

The researchers found that as dopamine is released in the brain it first acts on one

receptor called dDA1 which helps memories form. After a memory solidifies, dopamine

is still being released but this time it acts on another receptor called DAMB which starts

to chip away at the memory unless something significant is attached to it, in the case

of the flies, that might be a sweet smell or an electric shock. The process of solidifying

a memory from a short term to long term is called consolidation.

The researchers think this mechanism might be why savants have such extraordinary memories.

Maybe it’s not that they have a better memory but that they worse forgetting mechanisms.

And that could be beneficial! It might help us remember the more important things and

keep us from being overwhelmed by the bad things and the not so important things, like

certain exes.

Anyways, before we go on a trip down memory lane, do you love DNews? We want to hear from

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As always thanks for watching!

So do you have any memories you’d rather forget? Let us know in the comments below

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coming back here! We’ve got new episodes every day of the week.