About the goddess of memory and the blessing of forgetting

We all forget. We forget all the time, and even if it's annoying at that moment (when you found out that the cell phone is at home - that the sandwich is not in the bag or that you forgot to do something important) it even has a good purpose. or many purposes.

Mnemosyne (or in English Mnemosyne, and in Greek Mνημοσύνη) was considered one of the most powerful goddesses in the ancient world. After all, to the belief of many (then, and maybe even today) memory is what distinguishes us from animals. This is the ability that allows us to examine facts, draw logical conclusions, and establish great civilizations (or alternatively remember the password to Facebook and spend hours and hours there...).

I like the reference to Mnemosyne as one of the first philosophies in the world. After all, when you are the goddess responsible for the meaning of every object around you, you are the one who creates the logic and understanding. In an era where literacy was rare, the importance of memory was extraordinary - not only remembering what to call what, but also the preservation of culture, laws, and the recognition of all the wonders of creation.

On the other hand, just as it is important to have light on the side of darkness, and noise on the side of silence...

Forgetfulness plays an equally important role. The ability to forget plays a significant role in adapting to the environment, no less than the ability to remember. The ability to forget can be looked at from a number of aspects, and I hope to address a few more, in future posts.

An important omission From the cognitive point of view (That is, from the mental - computational point of view and the processes that go through us while we try to remember). When we have a large number of details in our memory, it can be increasingly difficult to retrieve what we are Really need to know. What's more, many details in the memory are really irrelevant or "out of date". For example - old phone numbers that are not valid, or the different location of the car parking place every night of the past 365 nights. What really interests us is where we parked last night, so that we can get to the car in the morning, and that's all.

It is just as important to our survival as a species Postpartum forgetfulness. After all, we are told that giving birth is a painful process, since the days of "and with sadness, I will give birth to sons". As a woman and a member of the human race, I certainly hope that this can also be an empowering process with a pleasant character alongside the physical pain, and in any case there is no doubt that its reward is great and worthwhile. But if it is something so painful, how come so many women keep doing it again and again?

It turns out that the way in which the pain is restored in the months after birth is very important, and that we do have a tendency to reduce its severity. In a study by researchers from Mechan Karolinska in Sweden, 1383 women who gave birth were asked to rate their pain from 1 to 7 (with 7 indicating the worst pain imaginable), over time - two months after giving birth, one year after, and 5 years later. It turns out that 49% of the women reported feeling less pain as time passed. A little over a third 35% rated the pain as the same, and 16% considered it worse.

But - in science as in science - beyond the fading of the pain memory, the researchers found another explanation for this. A connection was found between remembering the feeling of the pain experience in childbirth and the woman's feeling about the experience as a whole. The more she felt cared for, and reported receiving a lot of support in the process from her environment, the more the memory of the feeling of pain faded. In other words, blessed forgetfulness in this case was closely related to other things that the woman had gone through, and could have influenced her perception and memory.

This finding sounds to me not only scientific, but also logical. A family where the mother receives support and experience Good experience of bringing another soul into the world and growing it, with the support of a community, or of a pleasant and easy birth center... Forget about the pain. And here it is possible to "coolly" state that such a situation is accompanied by an evolutionary goal - another birth and another offspring, under conditions that allow its growth and enjoyment.

Another angle in which forgetfulness can be considered is in situations where the person prefers to forget and experiences unpleasant, intrusive and disturbing memories. This is one of the characteristics of Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and in this case overcoming the experience and winning oblivion, or at least blessed silence, is a blessing.

So that memory and forgetting work together, working side by side for our intellectual, mental, and even tribal capacity. The ability to remember is wonderful, but there is also a blessing in forgetting.

_{Links and sources:}

_{The research on the memory of pain in childbirth}

_{Waldenstrom, U. and Schytt, E. A longitudinal study of women's memory of labor pain: from 2 months to 5 years after the birth. BJOG: An International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 2008.}

_{The goddess of memory in the Hebrew Wikipedia}