The Power of Forgetting (27 page)

You’d be amazed at what’s already stored in your head. So much of our ability to recall information can be measured by our ability to recall names and faces. Thus, if you
can strengthen and optimize your capacity to recall anyone’s name in a split second, you’re simultaneously fortifying and expanding your capacity to recollect
anything
. You’re speeding up those parts of the mind that allow you to pluck out any piece of stored information in a flash, from snippets of small data like a name to the larger chunks of data that are encoded by details.

In the appendixes, I’ll offer a few more games that will exercise your organizing skills. You’ll have more opportunities to master cataloging and systematizing massive amounts of information. For now, it’s time to learn one of the least appreciated skills in the business of developing a fast mind: forgetting. Knowing how and when to “forget” will ultimately help you truly master the orchestra that is constantly playing in your mind. It will further assist you in mobilizing and coordinating incoming information without losing sight of the important facts.

It helps to read this chapter once every few months, or at least twice a year, to remind yourself of all the strategies you can use to organize your thoughts and incoming data more effectively. Let’s face it: When left to its own devices, the mind can quickly revert to disorganized chaos, handling information messily and sloppily. We all would do well to work on our mental organization on a routine basis. Aim to do the exercises and play the games described in this chapter as often as you can, especially the ones you find the most enjoyable.

And remember: Although the lessons outlined in this chapter may not seem directly related to tackling tough challenges in the real world and organizing “real information” in a business setting, in a social environment, or at school, they in fact work your brain the same way that you must think when trying to manage any kind of data. From the moment we wake up in the morning to the second our head hits the pillow at night, our brain is dealing with an enormous array of information—some of it trivial but a lot of it essential.
From checking e-mail and using social media to sitting in a classroom or meeting to listening to the radio or reading material during a commute to handling the rigors of a corporate environment that inundates us with constant data to remember, there’s no end to the level of mental organization we force our brains to do daily.

Those who can make a habit of organizing information easily, simply, and quickly are in a much better position to achieve success sooner rather than later and to set themselves apart from others, which ultimately helps them to advance their careers. Even if you master just one strategy from this chapter and use it in your daily life, I trust you will notice a difference. And it won’t just be in your ability to remember things and impress your peers; you’ll find that everyday tasks get easier and the routine chores that used to annoy or frustrate you don’t bother you anymore because you find ways to accomplish them in a more organized fashion. Indeed, as I noted at the beginning of this chapter, once mental organization becomes second nature, all other forms of organization come automatically, too.

Memory’s Linchpin

It seems counterintuitive: Why would you want to learn how to forget in order to remember? But it’s essential, as you no doubt know by now. As I’ve been hinting at all along in this book, forgetting is memory’s linchpin—it’s perhaps the ultimate secret weapon to powering up the mind and maximizing its capacity to hold information. And yet, like the other skills you’ve already learned, this one is seldom taught in formal education. In fact, when I teach this skill during my live shows, students and adults alike express surprise that I place so much importance on the word “forget” because it sounds so paradoxical and they don’t typically hear it used in terms of learning … and learning
better
.

In
chapter 6
, I taught you how to organize your thoughts, but this skill cannot truly be mastered until you learn how to forget. Forgetting is a two-part process. First you have to know how to distinguish between what’s “high quality” or important and what’s “low quality” or insignificant, and then you have to be able to evict the petty, peripheral (and usually distracting) material from your mind—forever.

This is not a trivial point. Forgetting is hard to do intentionally! Of course, lots of things happen in life that we would prefer to forget, such as accidents or dreadful experiences, a bad grade or evaluation from our superiors, an argument with another person, a painful bout with an illness, or a period of enormous struggle and strife for whatever reason. But I’m not referring here to forgetting particular events or occurrences. I’m talking instead about the streams of information that constantly bombard our minds and that we try to take in as fast as they arrive. Whether we’re sitting in a classroom or watching an informative TV show, we have a tendency to want to remember everything, including the pointless, which makes for very cluttered minds unable to think clearly or quickly.

When I picture how people must have learned to “forget” centuries ago, I imagine that it was a little easier to do then than it is today. It may have even come much more naturally, because people didn’t have so many means with which to try to record all the minutiae coming into the brain. They simply held on to thoughts that were necessary for survival and unconsciously let the rest escape from their minds. There were no computers or handheld devices, and writing implements were inaccessible to most people.

And there certainly weren’t any Post-it notes or reminder apps. Today, however, we live surrounded by these unlimited resources and with the constant urge to log everything and saddle ourselves with the impossible chore of sustaining it all in our minds.

Can you recall how many neurons I said a typical adult brain contains? If you say any number between fifteen billion and two hundred billion, you are right. That’s a huge range. Assuming we use the lower figure, the brain is capable of remembering the amount of information in ten billion encyclopedia pages. And even that’s a lot of data. The amazing capacity of the human mind revolves around its ability to be bombarded with millions of bits of diverse information every single day. It must also be able to store these and convert them into intelligent thoughts. It achieves this by evaluating, sorting, figuring, and redirecting information based on sequences and relationships. It discards the irrelevant bits of information and fills in the blanks with bits of information from its files.

What happens, though, when the brain has a hard time throwing out the rubbish? When the brain literally cannot forget anything? Like a clogged drain, it gets backed up. Information—both valuable and worthless—blends together in a cloudy mess. Brain fog sets in. And brainpower wanes. Which is why “evaluation” is so critical. By placing value on certain bits of information and forgetting the rest, we let the important information advance to the forefront and form a bigger part of our mental picture. We have the ability to do this temporarily (in short-term memory) or permanently (in long-term memory). Forgetting, in essence, is the art of neglecting or dismissing certain details from the incoming data
in order to keep the brain clean, organized, and humming like a well-oiled machine. This, in turn, is what allows us to continue seeking out more information, assimilating it in our minds, and using it to our benefit.

On a grander scale, there’s another hidden benefit to being able to forget that rarely gets attention. Forgetting what we know—at the appropriate time—can be an enormously powerful tool for gaining insight. Think about it: Without the ability to forget, our minds remain “stuck” with ready-made answers. We’re not motivated to ask the questions that can lead our thinking to new ideas. To better grasp this concept, which I admit sounds abstract, consider the following: Legend has it that one day, on his regular walk past the local blacksmith’s workshop on the island of Samos, the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras temporarily forgot that the banging sounds produced by the smith’s hammering of iron bars were “noise”—his usual reaction. Instead he viewed them as “information” and soon discovered that musical pitch is a function of the length of the material being struck, which became his first principle of mathematical physics.

If we don’t allow ourselves to forget once in a while, not only will we lose out on remembering the important information, but we’ll also lose out on opportunities to gain new perspectives. We’ll also cause so much congestion in our brains that we won’t be able to accomplish tasks quickly and methodically. And it’s no mystery that the potential for mental logjams looms large today given the colossal amount of data we are exposed to daily. “Data overload” is practically a cliché; though some people are more interested in the toll that data overload takes on our stress levels and psychology, I like to remind folks that above all it’s undermining our
mental acuity. It’s robbing us of our potential and our paths to success.

Mentally and intentionally letting go of information requires practice, sometimes via exercises that at first seem entirely unrelated to the job of forgetting. The goal of this chapter is to help you become proficient in this critical skill and use it to accomplish a broad spectrum of challenges. Because this is one of the more advanced skills we’ll be learning, you’ll need to call upon your mastery of all the skills I’ve already covered in the previous chapters. The previous skills build to this master skill and make forgetting possible. So put your thinking, focusing, organizing, problem-solving, and concentrating caps on!

We’re going to start with three of my favorite activities; then we’ll have a recap of the importance of pattern recognition within the context of forgetting and end with a discussion about the lost art of note-taking in the realm of forgetting. You should master all of the lessons in this chapter—indeed, you should go over them as often as possible. They are the weight-lifting exercises for flexing your brain in (pardon the pun) mind-bending ways. Every time you perform these mental workouts, your mind will get stronger.

Remember: Everyone has the ability to forget. The art is
knowing when to use it
and using it wisely. As novelist Henry Miller once stated: “My ‘forgettery’ has been just as important to my success as my memory.”

This may appear to be all about math, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful ways to give your brain a calisthenics
workout and employ the tricky art of forgetting. That’s right: Learning how to rapidly multiply two-digit numbers in your head using my nifty shortcut will force you to forget certain information along the path to a solution. This exercise also reveals an aspect to forgetting that I haven’t touched on yet: Sometimes we need to work with a piece of information momentarily and then expel it from our minds to make room for a new piece of information in that mental “space.” Multiplying two-digit numbers easily without a calculator marvelously illustrates this skill, as you’ll soon find out when you go through the steps. This skill can be applied to a wide variety of subjects, not just math, because every day we need to delete old, obsolete files in our brain so it can store new ones.