Benefits of forgetting

If you depend on your phone's calendar to remember the payments you have to make next week or the appointment to renew your passport and to start your vacation abroad, do not feel bad, forgetting data is a sign that your brain works correctly. 

With the start of the holiday period in schools, many parents are worried that while they are resting, their children will forget much of what they have learned! (Experts define this as “learning loss "). This is one of the reasons they are looking to enroll children in regularization courses in mathematics and chemistry or English classes, for example.
 
Of course, remembering little of what you saw in class is a serious problem when you have to complete a final exam or your entrance to college; however, experts say that forgetting inconsequential details shows that your neurons are "fulfilling" their work, which consists of separating the really important from the trivial information.

 
This was demonstrated by research (published in the journal Neuron), whose authors, scientists at the University of Toronto, Canada, found that the growth of new neurons in the hippo campus (brain area involved in memory), helps us to forget information with the purpose of making room for more relevant data.

 
The role of memory is to "make you an intelligent person who can make decisions according to circumstances and a fundamental aspect in this regard is to be able to forget some information," explains researcher Blake Richards, responsible for the work.
If you are worried that your child may forget what he or she has learned in the previous school year, summer classes may help, but some simple tricks, such as paying more attention during class and asking as many questions as possible, on the subject, the less likely you will be to forget it.

 
It would also be helpful to manually compose notes summarizing the class; specialists say that by handwriting, more regions of the brain are activated and learning forms, symbols and languages ​​are favored.

 
In addition, it is known that when writing with a pen or pen, we use the brain much more than when we use the keyboard of the computer or Smartphone. 


Forgetting is, therefore, a natural way for the brain to prepare for more information, so do not be alarmed if your children stop thinking about books, exams and jobs over the next few weeks ... they are making room for what they will learn the next school year!