Chapter 3: What We Choose to Keep

*Chapter 3: The Architecture of Forgetting*

There is a well-documented phenomenon in cognitive science that researchers have, with characteristic understatement, termed *motivated forgetting*. The term describes the brain's capacity—some would say preference—for selectively degrading memories that the organism has determined, at some level below conscious awareness, to be inconvenient. This is not, it should be stressed, a pathology. It is, rather, a feature.

The question that interests me is not why we forget. The question that interests me is what we choose to forget, and what the choice reveals.

Consider the studies of eyewitness testimony, which have, over the past forty years, thoroughly dismantled the legal system's confidence in human memory as a reliable record of events. Witness after witness, in controlled conditions, with every incentive to recall accurately, fails to recall accurately. They remember weapons that weren't there. They fail to notice changes to the appearance of suspects shown to them minutes earlier. They construct, in good faith, memories of events that did not happen.

What they are doing, we now understand, is not recording. They are narrating. The difference is significant.

A recording…