The Power of Forgetting (31 page)

Sometimes the way you combine studying or retaining information with other activities can affect how well you remember the material. The trick is to avoid what psychologists call
retroactive inhibition
, something that happens when a new or unrelated activity interferes with previous learning. Acclaimed educator and leadership coach David B. Ellis writes about this in his seminal work
Becoming a Master Student
, a popular college text now in its thirteenth edition.

As an example that demonstrates this phenomenon described by Ellis, let’s say that you’ve just left an intoxicating presentation about astronomy that included a fascinating lecture on the origins of the universe. Within seconds of letting the details really soak into your brain as you reflect on
them, you find yourself checking your cell phone for messages and realizing that you have tons of unanswered calls and e-mails to address. Suddenly, your mind is yanked out of the thoughts from the lecture and becomes totally immersed in the relatively menial tasks you have yet to complete for the day. You begin to analyze how you’ll check items off your to-do list and soon find that you can think of little else. The key concepts of the astronomy lecture are pushed aside by your gripping concern about these other responsibilities.

Although we may think that our minds can multitask, they often falter when they are coerced into juggling competing thoughts, especially if one of these thoughts isn’t all that set into the brain yet. That thought then becomes fleeting and cannot be restored again. I have no doubt that this partly explains why there’s been an inverse relationship between our multitasking demands (going up) and our critical-thinking skills (going down). The good news is that we can reverse this trend if we change how we choose to operate.

Consider another version of the astronomy-lecture scenario. Let’s assume instead that you go to the lecture with a friend. On the way home the two of you talk about what you heard and how you thought about it. The discussion ignites into a lively debate as you and your friend take opposite stands on belief systems with regard to who or what created the universe. Later, just before going to sleep, your brain can now process the key points of the lecture, which will come in handy the next time you want to spark a conversation on this very subject or perhaps be quizzed on it formally. Keeping your head in the subject matter of the lecture rather than letting yourself get distracted by other menial tasks made all the difference. Those synapses and neurons in your brain
worked long enough to create a rock-solid memory. In the first scenario, you didn’t give yourself time and the details quickly vanished from your short-term memory before they could safely be stored and stockpiled in your long-term memory bank.

These pointers aren’t just for kids and students. Adults will find these techniques for filtering information helpful to maximize and optimize their own mental organization for everyday life. For example, if you’re a corporate executive who religiously writes down every word during a meeting or tries to learn by rote memory a speech that will help you gain a promotion, you’re doing a great disservice to your poor brain. Your ability to perform well at work or think on your feet is also severely compromised. Think back to the story I told at the beginning of this chapter about Pythagoras. Momentarily forgetting, taking in a new piece of information, and treating it entirely differently from before was what allowed him to make a new discovery. That’s the kind of insight that the combination of organizing and forgetting can achieve. We rely on conventional wisdom all the time, but what would happen if you forgot the obvious answers that spring to mind and searched instead for new ones? I think you’ll find that you’ll be much more creative, inventive, and solution oriented.

Being able to cherry-pick repeated information and lock it into your memory while you throw out the remainder is perhaps one of the greatest skills that anyone—including bona fide savants and memory champs—can have. And anyone can achieve this skill with practice. Use the exercises in this chapter as often as you can to make forgetting an automatic function in your brain.

Despite all the commitments we juggle daily in our lives, rarely do we forget to tend to the important stuff—like brushing our teeth, eating when hungry, picking up our kids from school, paying bills, buying groceries, and responding to friends in need. These activities are all habits we keep that come automatically and reflect the rhythm and beats—
patterns
—of our lives. And we have an innate ability to disregard the stuff that can wait until later or be placed lower on the list of priorities. We know the difference, for example, between responding to a crying baby, upset spouse, or screaming boss and returning e-mails that can wait. Some things in life are relatively easy to prioritize without any thought. The subtle things, however, can be harder to triage or know how to deal with on the spot and can disrupt our rhythm and slow us down. This is especially true when it comes to the influx of information that needs to be sorted out in the brain before any action is taken.

The whole point of the exercises in this book has been to help you more naturally process incoming information so you can think productively and have plenty of mental storage space to preserve the facts and details that ultimately allow you to reason, remember, and carry out your everyday tasks easily, quickly, and efficiently. Of course, another goal of these exercises has been to facilitate more creative thinking and become an excellent problem solver. These are the qualities that shape productive thinkers who can achieve more in less time. I mean that literally and figuratively. After all, we all have the same twenty-four hours in a given day, 365 days a year. So how is it that some people seem to defy finite time constraints and achieve a tremendous amount more than
others? How do you explain why others are able to accomplish a great deal more with the same resources and talent as everyone else? The answer lies in whether or not the people behind those achievements have formed habits that leverage the six skills maximally in the real world.

You don’t need to know how to compute difficult equations quickly in your head (unless your job relies on math), and you don’t need to alphabetize words to become a successful entrepreneur or CEO of a
Fortune
500 company or otherwise have an impact in the world. But you do need to possess a collection of practical tools that help you to navigate real-world challenges and problems you’ll encounter on the road to success. And you’ll be surprised by how connected the exercises in this book are to working the brain in those real-world scenarios. If you make a habit of flexing your brain in the ways I’ve been describing, all the habits you keep become painless—including the coveted habits of, say, a highly successful person and someone others look up to. And you won’t forget the important stuff.

My guess is the title to this book initially threw you off. But by now I hope you’ve come to appreciate the power of forgetting in a whole new way. It’s through the lens of forgetting that we can keep our brains clutter free, primed for creativity, and poised to change the world. Just make a habit of forgetting as you would remembering. Use the skills learned in this book to balance the competing demands your brain is constantly handling to stay sharp, mindful, fast, insightful, and at times forgetful. Soon enough you’ll become the sharpest, smartest you.

As with the previous chapter, it helps to reread this chapter once every couple of months or twice a year to remind yourself of the “forgetting” strategies and recognize patterns more frequently. See if you can perform the exercises in this chapter as often as possible. I like to alphabetize words on a daily basis as I’m driving and noticing words around me. Multiplying two-digit numbers in your head might not be something you want to do every day, but the more you train your brain to take this particular shortcut—“forgetting” along the way—the sharper and quicker your brain will be.

Additional Challenges

No matter what you do in life or how far you take your formal education, you never stop learning. The key to life, and perhaps to the universe itself, is to never stop learning. Just as I truly believe that parents are the most important component in a child’s reaching his or her full academic potential, you are the most important component to reaching your own fullest potential in your adult life. We all learn basically the same things in traditional schooling. What we learn and experience outside of formal education is what sets each one of us apart. The people we meet and the mentors we keep can change from year to year, but we essentially remain the same. We may get our information at school or at work, but learning habits and strategies often come from elsewhere—in the things we do at home and in our personal time.

Perhaps nothing is more gratifying than being praised for a job well done or told that you’re “brilliant” upon solving
a complex problem, achieving a major accomplishment, or coming up with some great idea. Can anyone be brilliant? Is there a productive thinker in each of us that can pave the way to monumental success in life? Do we each have a “smart switch” somewhere deep inside that we can turn on by using memory strategies, exercises, and systems like the ones I use?

We may be no better at appreciating just what makes the human brain so remarkable and, in some ways, unpredictably extraordinary than our grandparents were, but we do have a much greater understanding of how it operates, what contributes to both its health and its decline, and the myriad ways in which we can optimize its functionality, including its ability to process information and safely store it for future use. Though people like to talk about our beating heart being the center of our lives (after all, it’s the heartbeat we seek in those first few weeks of life), it’s really the brain that takes center stage. Our heart wouldn’t beat without our brain, and it is our brain that allows us to experience the world on every level—to feel pleasure and pain, to love and to learn, to decide what to do, and to participate in life in ways that make life worth living!

Until we meet a health challenge that affects our brain’s capacity or functionality, we tend to take our mental faculties for granted while we worry about so many other pressing things, from our daily responsibilities to our long-term goals and aspirations. We assume that our mind will travel with us wherever we go and be there for us. But what if that won’t always be true? And what if we can in fact accelerate our brainpower hundreds of times over just by actively nurturing it in the ways I’ve been describing?

The idea that we have a master “smart switch” hidden
somewhere in the recesses of our brain is as fascinating as it is mystical. Maybe one day we’ll be able to come much closer to understanding what turns on one person’s brain to full power while another person’s brain lags behind, all other things—including genetics—being equal. Maybe we’ll also find out that our control over our smart switch relies more on how we are trained to use our minds in everyday life than on anything else. I believe this is very realistic, because what I attempt to do every single day in my work—guiding people through this mental training—is producing results that I cannot attribute to just luck or giftedness or talent or even genes.

We live in a vastly different world now from just a generation ago; few people will dispute the profound impact that technology has had on all of us. Could you go a day without your cell phone? A week without checking e-mail or responding to texts? A month totally unplugged from the Internet? How about a year sans any comforts of modern life, such as access to all things computer-related or digital? While you’d like to think that you could do it, chances are you’d have a tough time. These technologies afford us the opportunity to be more efficient, productive, and knowledgeable. They also can help us be healthier and happier. But with all this comes a profusion of potential distractions as well as costs to our health if we end up feeling overwhelmed, stressed, and anxious and living on the brink of a meltdown as we grapple with an unending to-do list. I don’t think it’s a stretch of the imagination to connect our high-tech world and the inherent expectations that it places on us with an increase in health challenges from insomnia to depression.