People usually consider forgetting to be a problem - a human frailty to be avoided and overcome. Yet, a memory system that works too well burdens us with irrelevant and distracting information and makes it difficult to adapt in the aftermath of unpleasant life experiences. Neuroscience has increasingly recognized that a healthy memory benefits from the ability to forget and has established the existence of active mechanisms that foster forgetting of unwanted memories. Indeed, the neural mechanisms by which we defend ourselves against unwanted memories and thoughts are increasingly well understood, and in the next decade, we are strongly positioned to develop a multi-level mechanistic model of this process that spans from cognition to synapses. In this talk, I will present an overview of what we have learned about how the brain accomplishes motivated forgetting, and how these mechanisms ultimately shape what we remember of life experience, protecting our mental health. Special attention will be paid to how the processes identified here resemble and differ from classical notions of Freudian Repression.

Michael Anderson is professor of cognitive neuroscience at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. After finishing his Ph.D. from UCLA in 1994 and a postdoctoral fellowship at UC Berkeley, he joined the faculty at the University of Oregon in 1995, where he formed the Memory Control Laboratory. Over the past 20 years, his group has been studying the cognitive and neural mechanisms by which people control unwanted memories, with a particular focus on the involvement of motivated inhibitory control. He is widely known internationally for his work on people’s ability to suppress memory retrieval, and the potential role that such mechanisms may play in inducing both incidental and motivated forgetting, with work appearing in Science, Nature, and Psychological Review.