Remembering everything is best forgotten

Our brains may be capable of total recall, but that would be a curse, not a blessing

Forget information overload, the world of science has declared that the human brain has enough storage capacity to house every book ever published – 36 times over. Apparently the hippocampus, the area of the brain that deals with memory, boasts a space 10 times bigger than previously estimated. Operating at full whack, it could hold more than a petabyte of data – whatever that is – equivalent to 4.7 billion tomes.

This is vastly more than neuroscientists had imagined. And bad news for anyone who has read E L James’s execrable prose and is longing to erase it from their memory.

Bad news for everyone, in fact. For, despite George Santayana’s oftrepeated adage – “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it” – the very human condition depends on a state of facilitating forgetfulness.

Our lives are built out of a catalogue of mistakes and mortifications, requiring obliviousness to cover the human mind like a gentle snow. Its alternative would be a state of permanent post-traumatic stress disorder. For all our attempts at Sherlock Holmes-style “mind palaces”, wiping the memory slate clean is what keeps us sane.

Alas, I know of what I speak. For, while I boast no recollection whatsoever for useful information, my memory for crucifying emotional trivia knows no bounds. I can still remember the horror of the clammy hand of a child who repulsed me stuck into my own six-year-old palm; taste the sweat on my upper lip induced by inadvertently flashing my knickers at the boys’ sixth form. Idiot acts by former lovers are etched into my brain; idiot acts of my own still more so.

But at least I can let some things fade, unlike poor Jill Price, the woman who can remember every moment of her life since the (particularly heinous) age of 14. Ms Price describes her mind as a split-screen television, one side showing the present, the other displaying memories she cannot suppress. Unsurprisingly, she blames her superpower for her depression, lamenting: “I recall every bad decision, insult and excruciating embarrassment. Over the years, it has eaten me up. It has paralysed me.”

I’m with Nietzsche, who argued that not to forget was a sign of pathological illness, concluding: “Without forgetting, it is quite impossible to live at all.” Goldfish brains are a blessing when the alternative is lying awake at 4am gurning with shame. Sobriety, as Dry January adherents will have discovered, brings a lacerating state of remembrance that makes one long for the beautiful black holes of the bender.

Dickens’s final Christmas story, The Haunted Man, concerns a professor

whose own ghost offers him the relief that is to “forget the sorrow, wrong, and trouble you have known… to cancel their remembrance”; a Victorian take on the film Eternal

Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There is, of course, a catch: “The gift that I have given you, you shall give again, go where you will.”

This being Dickens, this royally screws everyone up: husbands go off wives, nippers turn on their siblings, and a student is rude to his landlady. Apocalypse looms, until the professor sees the error of his ways. At the end, before everyone has the obligatory mince pie, the ghastly Milly (one of Dickens’s “good women”) moralises: “It is important to remember past sorrows and wrongs so that you can then forgive those responsible and, in doing so, unburden your soul and mature as a human being”.

To which I say: “Yeah, whatevs.” I’ll hang on to the reminders of great sex, red-letter days and fragments of poetry. But you can keep stomach flu, chemistry lessons, and the aforementioned Fifty Shades.