The Art of Forgetting [Paperback]

How do we forget? Why do we need to forget? This book intends to answer to these and other questions. It aims to demonstrate that each one is who it is due to their own memories. Thus, distinguish between the information we should keep from those we should forget is an difficult art. In this book, the author discusses about the different types of memory, the main?types of forgetting (avoidance, extinction and repression), their brain areas and their mechanisms. In this sense, the art of forgetting, or the art of do not saturate our memory mechanisms, is something innate, that benefits us anonymously, keeping us from sinking amidst our own memories. The essays that compose this book go through several aspects, since individuals to societies' memory. By the end of the book, the reader will be able to understand that we forget to be able to think, to live and to survive.1 Introduction.-2. The art of forgetting2.1 The formation and retrieval of memories2.2 Forms of forgetting; first steps of the art. Extinction, repression, discrimination2.3 Conditioned reflexes2.4 The rapid forgetting of working memory is intrinsic to its nature2.5 Brain areas and systems involved in the different types of memory; some basic notions of neuronal function2.6 Executive functions2.7 More on the connections between nerve cells2.8 The forgetting of short- and long-term memory2.9 Memory and emotions2.10 More on memory and emotions: endogenous state dependency2.11 The use and disuse of synapses2.12 Failure of memory persistence as a form of forgetting?2.13 Reconsolidation2.14 Practicing memory2.15Reading, knowledge, physical exercise, social life, memory and illness2.16 The art of forgetting: a second approach2.17 Denial and memory falsification2.18 Forgetting by large populations2.19 Surviving through neuronal death2.20 The famous case of patient H.M.2.21 When forgetting is not an art: amnesic patients2.22 Anterograde amnesia by an interference with consolidation2.23 Neuronal branching and tlS&