ABSTRACT
A CREATIVE INSIGHT: FORGETTING CAN BE ADAPTIVE To most people, forgetting is a terrible thing. To students taking exams, forgetting can mean poor grades. To business people trying to remember the names of customers or supervisors, forgetting can mean career failure. To the elderly, forgetting can mean imminent cognitive decline. e downside of forgetting is quite clear to everyone. Why do we forget? Does forgetting simply indicate a type of cognitive failure? If so, then why would the human species, supposedly in an advantageous evolutionary position in terms of our adaptive mental abilities, be so susceptible to forgetting? Perhaps, in spite of our susceptibility to forgetting, we humans nonetheless remember better than do other species. Perhaps this is so, yet faced with the amazing feats of memory shown by salmon remembering their spawning waters over a lifetime, bees remembering locations of food sources in relation to the hive and the times of day when those sources are optimal, and squirrels remembering locations of thousands of hidden food caches, the superiority of human memory seems less obvious.
