Dr. Scott Small is the Director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University. His book, “Forgetting - The Benefits of Not Remembering”, is an incredible book and highlights both the biological and psychological utility of forgetting. Notably, if you had a ‘real’ photographic memory - it would be a curse rather than a blessing. He shares stories of his patients, for individuals with normal memory loss due to aging, as well as those with Alzheimer’s disease.

I wanted to read this book because of my interest in neuroscience and to understand more about our cognitive functioning. Relating to research in artificial intelligence, there could be necessary tradeoffs between memorization and forgetting. A topic that comes to mind is how Transformer models apply attention to the most relevant parts of the input sequence. Our brains operate in similar ways with our ability to generalize inputs, but we would get lost in the details if we were to remember everything.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in neuroscience, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence research. Here are a couple of quotes from the book that I found interesting:

By testing different computer algorithms, computer scientists have learned that adding more memory - the equivalent of adding more dendritic spines - will not improve pattern recognition of faces or of anything else. The more effective way to artificially create human computational flexibility is to force the algorithm to have more forgetting.

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Is there an ethical benefit to forgetting? Most philosphers have focused on one: the benefit of forgiving. … “Letting go” is just another of the many everyday terms that can be neurologically translated into forgetting - in this case, the brain’s emotional forgetting that dulls the memory shards of an aggrieved pain.”

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