Forgetability

“The prerequisite of originality is the art of forgetting, at the proper moment, what we know.”

Arthur Koestler

Much has been made of memory.

Memory may very well be the most studied talent of the brain.  And for good reason.  A good memory is obviously essential in life and for certain aspects of the creative process.  You cannot interpret a cantata if you cannot remember the notes or dance expressively if the steps keep slipping from your mind.

A good memory can, of course, be innate.  Arturo Toscanini apparently had a vast memory of all the notes played by every instrument for every symphony he ever conducted.  Nice ability!  There are savants who remember numbers, dates, even every single detail of every day of their lives.  But how helpful all that is for anything other than showmanship is another question.

In Funes the Memorious, Jorge Luis Borges wrote of a young man who remembered every detail of everything he ever encountered.  It was a grand skill that, in the end, seemed to lead nowhere outside of the intricacies of his own isolated mind. 

Thousands of books have been dedicated to helping improve memory based on various theories of how the brain works.  Joseph Jacobs, a 19th century psychologist, first explored the notion that memory space consists of roughly seven “things”.  A thing, in this sense, is a cohesive unit with meaning… letter, number, word, image.  If you can pack a bunch of items into seven memories, you have a better chance of recalling them.

The Russian psychologist A. R Luria, studied a professional mnemonist called “S” who would associate each word on a list with an imaginary walk down a street in Moscow that he knew well.  In retracing his imaginary path, he would stop at each house and visualize the word inside.  Plato used this technique to keep track of the topics of his lengthy lectures; his school of philosophy was called Peripatetic, from the Greek word for “wandering.”
  

The familiar trick of turning lists into word sequences has been used by every schoolkid.  Every Good Boy Does Fine for the notes of the musical staff.  Lazy French Tarts Lie Naked In Anticipation for the nerves that pass through the superior orbital foramen of the skull…lacrimal, frontal, trochlear, lateral, nasociliary, internal, abducens.  King Philips Class Ordered a Family of Gentle Spaniels recalls categories of taxonomy…kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species.  HOMES triggers the names of the Great Lakes just as ROYGBIV does for the colors of the spectrum.

On a broader scale, storytelling – connecting ideas into a narrative – is another method for retaining information.  It is the way we recall our own experiences and is demonstrated by our amazing ability to retain and retell complex plotlines from movies, books, and TV shows…far more details than we might be able to dredge up if we were studying a list for a test.

Yet when you delve into it, memory is not all it is cracked up to be in the world of creative innovation.  In many ways a good memory ties us to what already exists but to come to new conclusions and presumptions, we must forget aspects of what we already know.  To innovate you have to forget what you know to be true and imagine a world not yet the case.

This suggests a complex dance between what is retained and what is rejected…sometimes it means forgetting all you know about the details in order to get to the big picture, as Einstein had to do to revolutionize physics.  Sometimes it means forgetting the big picture in order to discover new details, as Darwin did when he revolutionized science.

An effective memory, and any tricks and tools we can come up with to enhance it, has to be part of our Ingenarium.  But so does practical forgetting.  Not dementia but a kind of constructive forgetting.  An ability, in other words, to erase anything that clogs our creative arteries and holds us back.  Forgetability, a memory eraser, is the other side of the coin and just as crucial to innovation.

Of course if it could also wipe out bad memories, a memory cleaner would not only be a good addition to the Ingenarium…it would make a fortune.