Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 107, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 4 May 1916 — The Reason We Forget [ARTICLE]

The Reason We Forget

“Let me see, what was that name?’’ Haven’t we often heard that phrase, or one very like it? Doesn’t our memory often play us tricks and cause us to forget things we know perfectly well—“as well as I know my own name,’’ In fact? There is a reason for this; for nearly every case of loss of memory we can find a cause. This discovery has recently been made —and is one of the most important advances which psychology has made in the understanding of our mental life. Forgetting, of course, in one sense, is loss of memory. Hoty, first of all, do we remember things? It has been assumed by physiologists that every event we experience leaves its trace in the nervous substance of the brain, in much the same way that a “trace” is left upon the phonographic record by the scratch of the recording needle; if the Impression is “vivid”—that is, if it leaves a deep impression upon the nervous system—then we remember it; if not, we forget it. As the brain disintegrates with age, the memories become weak. This is the doctrine usually assumed for the storage of our memories. But psychologists have lately complained against this materialistic view of the facts. Of late years Professor Henri Bergson, in particular, has protested that such an explanation does not explain. We believe that memory is a mental thing, not a material one. To*be sure, there was "always the difficulty, in accounting for memory, that the brain cells, which are constantly being replaced, would eliminate the memorecord, but scientific men “got round” this by assuming that the new cell as it was deposited somehow “inherited” the traces of the previous one and thus retailed the memory. There was no evidence that it actually did so, but it was “assumed” to. -The strong protest against this ma-

terialistic view found support in the fact that practically none of our memories is ever lost, but all can be removed under suitable conditions And by proper means. Our memory is potentially almost perfect. We should all strive to improve the memory as much as possible, for upon it our very personality depends. If we had no memory we no feeling of “self” —no feeling that we are the same self we were yesterday. And if we did not have this feeling we should be “lower than the animals.” We may improve the memory by paying strict attention to what is being said or done, and by .trying to associate It with as many other things as possible which have interest for us, for it has been said that “association is nine-tenths of memory.” The more we forget the more we tend to forget, and the more we train the memory the better it becomes. Like all else, it improves with practice and habit. Forgetting is at times very awkward; it leads us into all sorts of social Inconveniences. We forget a name, an address, a word when we wish most to remember it. These acts of forgetfulness seem at first perfectly erratic and spontaneous; they s,eem to follow no law and be subject to no fixed rule. So, then, when we forget a name or thing—or by some error of speech or writing give another word for the right one —we can nearly always find out why this should be so and uncover the actual pro.cess involved by a careful analysis of , the previous trains of thought and action. We forget because we *wish to forget. It is a wellknown fact that we tend to forget unpleasant events m6re readily than we do pleasant ones. That is because of this fact—because, in one case, the memory is repressed, and in the other it Is not.

WISDOM 'OF PAW.

' Littie Lemuel—Say, paw, what Is the streetcleaning department? Paw —It’s the place where they explain to the dissatisfaction of taxpayers why the "streets not cleaned, son.