In Defence of Forgetting

[A] Forgetting is described in textbooks as a failure, a leak in a container that ought to hold what is put in, and the description survives because it matches how forgetting feels. [B] Retrieval is competitive: asking for one item raises the items that resemble it, and the time taken to produce the one wanted rises with the number of rivals available. [C] The handful of people documented with unusually complete recall report no advantage in reasoning, and several describe difficulty in summarising an experience. [D] A system that kept everything would have to search everything.

It does not follow that the brain deletes on purpose, and the stronger claims made for forgetting go beyond what the findings bear. Interference is a consequence of how items are stored, not a mechanism for removing them; the cases are too few to support any general conclusion; and the difficulties reported may follow from the unusual attention such people pay to their own past. What the evidence supports is smaller. Loss is the price of a system built to produce the right item quickly rather than to keep every item, and a price is not a purpose. Treating forgetting as a fault mistakes what the system is for; treating it as a design is a mistake of the opposite kind, and the second is now the more fashionable of the two.