... we could control our capacity for remembering?

Do you know any of these following situations? You miss important errands you have to run, after studying everything that stays in your head is the message you read on your smartphone in between or whenever some complicated affairs occur you just can not stop worrying about them?

I guess many of you listeners have this wish sometimes to just be able to forget about sad affairs or unpleasant parts of life. On the other hand we often complain about only remembering unimportant details and forgetting about the important ones. But what if we would be able to control our memories and decide what exactly we want to remember and which parts we would rather forget about?

Assumption one: remembering what we would really like to remember. In general this procedure would facilitate our life a lot. Whilst learning we could just watch TV or check messages without worries. There would be no anxiety to miss any appointment or important documents. Since we could decide which information we would remember later, a lot of daily-problems would simply disappear.

We would probably extend out knowledge until we would reach an infinite set. Everyone that would be just ready to learn could become incredibly intelligent. Ordinarily this is impossible. The process of learning and remembering is very complex.Within short time periods information gets eliminated and the process of learning requires repetitions and attention. Through this procedure we guarantee not to keep every little, unimportant detail in mind but it also reminds us of the fact that information has to be processed and repeated several times. Otherwise they just get lost.

This leads us to the second assumption: being able to forget about things we don't want to be remembered of. No matter if it would just be a small mistake that you made or something worse such as the death of a loved person or a breakup, forgetting about these things would simply make us happy. How often do we worry about the past and forget about the positive side of life. In fact it would be very relieving. But in my opinion there is also one huge draw-back.

I admit that it took me a while to find as well a negative aspect, but finally I did. What would be life if we could not learn out of mistakes? If we would simply delete them out of our memories. We would probably do same mistakes again and again but forget about the extend of grief and destrunction we would cause. We would not be able to move on and get just lazy, because no matter what we would know, that everybody is able to forget about it.

Sure, this whole idea may sound compelling. But in my opinion it would steal all our creativity, power and motivation. Mistakes are necessary to learn and to improve. And how should we be able to appreciate the good sides of life without having bad ones as well?