Directed Forgetting

Abstract

Imagine you are driving to work on a Wednesday morning and as always you park your car in the local multi-storey car park. At the end of another long working day you make your way back to the car park, keen to get home and begin relaxing into your evening. Without a second thought, most of us will easily locate our car and happily drive off home. But how did we successfully locate our car so easily? And more importantly, how did we remember to look for our car in the spot it was parked in today and not yesterday or even last week? This effortless process we barely take note of not only illustrates how we can dismiss irrelevant information but also highlights the importance of forgetting in human memory.

Without forgetting it is quite impossible to live at all¹

— Friedrich Nietzsche