ABSTRACT
If asked, most of us would probably say that our biggest memory problem is forgetting things we want to remember. Frequently, however, forgetting is exactly what we need to do to function efficiently. For example, to avoid disabling emotions or dysfunctional personal relationships, we may want to forget past events in our lives that are painful or embarrassing. Another motivation to forget is the need to contend with a changing world: We need to remember our current phone number, not the one we had a few years back; how the operating system on this computer works, not the one on our old machine, and so forth. Also, when we search our memories for desired information such as someone’s name, we continually—in a kind of “online” fashion—need to “forget” or inhibit closely related, but incorrect, information.
