Why do we forget?: Serena Dandini’s review

SI’m sure it happens to you too, but I no longer remember a tube. Nothing serious or pathological, just a smoky cloud covering episodes, names or people that I should remember – even if I only saw them once a few years ago – and that when you happen to meet them again they make you feel guilty with the famous phrase: “But why, don’t you remember me?”.

Rather than improvising unlikely excuses, it’s better to say no and goodnight. Yes, a deep night sometimes envelops my brain which many still consider brilliant. I know you understand me. We do the worst when we have to remember the name of an actor or a film that is on the tip of our tongue but instead he navigates alone in a synapse lost in the ocean of memory: “What’s the name of that actress? Come on, the one who is blonde but is now brunette, who made the film with the half-bald guy who left his wife for the babysitter…”.

If it weren’t for Google we would spend the evenings in embarrassing silence. Finally there is a saving and therapeutic book which will make you overcome that unpleasant feeling of inadequacy. It is a beautiful, flowing and dense essay Roberto Della Salaprofessor of Human Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Edinburgh, with the explanatory title: Why do we forget? A science of forgetting (Feltrinelli).

The content could be summed up with a quote from Jorge Luis Borges which goes more or less like this (ah the memory!): «The essence of what makes us human is not to be found in memory but in oblivion». But I wouldn’t do justice to the wealth of insights offered by the author to explain how our brain works a fascinating journey into the mechanisms of memory with scientific notations of the most advanced neuroscience which don’t look out of place next to the quotes from the comic Diabolik or to the detailed account of Agatha Christie’s famous amnesia, one of the most mysterious passages in her biography.

There is no forgetfulness, distraction or loss of memory that is not analyzed by Della Sala’s wisdom it also explains the danger of “zombie” memory, i.e. the traces of fake news that obsessively repeated by news manipulators remain in our brain as if they were true.

After reading it we will free ourselves from the annoying sense of guilt we feel when faced with our forgetfulness, given that without the right amount of forgetting we would be less intelligent and, as the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, «I have forgotten the books I have read, as well as the dinners I have eaten; nevertheless they made me who I am.”