Is Forgetting as you age a good thing? What is the blackboard effect?

By David Joel Miller, MS, Licensed Therapist, Counselor, and Certified Life Coach.

It’s been common to dismiss the role of forgetting things as simply an unavoidable part of aging. But the more I think about it and read about it, the more I see an important benefit or reason why the ability to forget is a part of the human memory system. Not all forgetting is equal.

I’ve come to call this necessary forgetting the blackboard effect.

If you’re old enough to remember when we wrote on blackboards and later green boards, then you will recall that over time, the chalk built up on the blackboard. Eventually, the layer of chalk became so thick that when you wrote more information on that board, it was unreadable. Someone had to come through and wash those boards clean to allow new information to be written on the board.

Sometimes our brains need to erase old information to make room for the new. As we go through life, we learn the names of people. Later on, we tend to forget many of those early names. If each of us had to go through the entire list of names of everyone from each of our classes as we went through school, it would probably be late in the afternoon before we were able to recall the name of the person we were talking with.

One reason it gets harder for me, and other people in my age range, to learn new information is that it gets harder and harder to forget the old information. I first learned to do rudimentary programming using a RadioShack TRS 80 model 2 with eight-inch floppy diskettes. As I recall, the computer had 64 K of memory. We put more capacity into children’s toys that come free and fast-food lunches.

The problem here, however, is that whenever I encounter a problem with my current computer, I have to run through how did we do it when we had floppy diskettes, 8-inch diskettes, and then the five-inch and three-inch diskettes, and eventually the memory devices, flash cards, and expansion drives. When trying to do a new operation, my brain is cluttered with trying to forget all the steps that I’ve had to learn to do this operation on previous units with different hardware and software.

Forgetting may actually be the heart of wisdom.

We used to view older people as the source of wisdom. While the young hunters might remember the weather from last week and where they saw the deer yesterday, the elders remember all those dry years when the deer moved in One Direction towards wetter lands and more food, and how in the wet years they sought out different terrains.

Sometimes I wish I were better at forgetting.

Recently, I did some traveling to visit relatives. Some of it involved driving, and some involved flying. As a result, I had to use several rental cars. Now remember, I’ve been driving for 60 years. Probably more than that, but let’s not tell motor vehicles that part. As a result of all that driving, I’ve used a lot of different models of cars. I found it very difficult to adapt to some of the newer rental cars because they had features I didn’t know how to operate, and the controls I was used to were not located where they needed to be.

Even driving one rental car for a month and getting used to it did not prepare me for turning it in, and a few months later, I drove a different make and model, where the controls operated in another way. Trying to use the GPS and hitting the wrong button, suddenly having a video playing, and your directions disappearing, can be a very frustrating experience.

God, I wish I still had some of those old paper maps.

I find it very hard to navigate using GPS. For at least 50 plus years of my life and hundreds of years before that north was always at the top of the map. I’ve learned enough about the old ways to figure out where North and South, East and West, are by observing where the sun comes up in the morning and sets in the evening.

Suddenly, the GPS lady shows me a map in which, to go north, I have to drive from the top down or even from left to right. It leaves me very disoriented. Younger people are used to just following the arrow and letting the GPS tell them if they’re going in the right direction, but I do not like trying to go West by driving away from the sun in the afternoon.

It is not remembering or forgetting that’s the problem.

As we age, it is important to let go of some of the fine details and learn to look for the general patterns. Let’s leave the fine details for the specialist historians. What is important for functioning as you accumulate more trips around the sun is cognitive flexibility. It’s deciding what things you need to remember and letting all the other fine details go.

Computers and even artificial intelligence are excellent at retrieving facts and sources that have long ago escaped my memory. But for deciding where to go and what to do, and even more importantly, whom to do it with, I need to be able to remember the broad principles I learned about what I like and what is acceptable to me.

I seriously question a lot of contemporary wisdom that tries to see immense patterns out of one incident rather than the long course of history.

My conclusion?

Try to keep exercising your brain by thinking deeply and by thinking for yourself. Let the trivial things go, but remember you decide what is important to you and what little details are trivial. Focus on the positive, and you’ll get more of it. Spending all your time looking for Unhappiness and you will live a life full of disappointment.

Recommended Mental Health Books

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Yes, I do. I can see private pay clients if they live in California, where I am licensed. If you’re interested in information about that, please email me or use the contact me form.

Recently, I began working with a telehealth company called Grow Therapy. If you’d like to make an appointment to work with me, contact them, and they can do the required paperwork and show you my available appointments. The link for making an appointment to talk with me is: David Joel Miller, LMFT, LPCC 

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