So you’re saying that you cannot imagine having memories so traumatic that you would prefer to erase them from your head (and, say, give yourself a written record so that you aren’t tormented by the missing information). I’m not talking about a painful breakup here—consider the most inconvenient possible world, e.g., one in which you have memories of being tortured for months or years on end.
Even with memories that cause PTSD, it’s not so much the forgetting that helps as the being able to reconsolidate the memories without them being hooked into trauma.
From that article, it seems that knb’s original resolution to not erase any memories is doomed to failure—since the brain already erases our memories and re-writes them using something like a lossy compression scheme each time we recall them.
So you’re saying that you cannot imagine having memories so traumatic that you would prefer to erase them from your head (and, say, give yourself a written record so that you aren’t tormented by the missing information). I’m not talking about a painful breakup here—consider the most inconvenient possible world, e.g., one in which you have memories of being tortured for months or years on end.
Unless these memories cause PTSD, they’re still valuable experience.
Even with memories that cause PTSD, it’s not so much the forgetting that helps as the being able to reconsolidate the memories without them being hooked into trauma.
From that article, it seems that knb’s original resolution to not erase any memories is doomed to failure—since the brain already erases our memories and re-writes them using something like a lossy compression scheme each time we recall them.