Training yourself to forgive and forget

Forgetfulness is a high evolutionary trait in the alpha male. You’ve read it right: forgetfulness (not forginevess). Not a misprint.  If you know how to forget easily and often, guess what: you are evolving better and stronger.

The goal of this blog is betterment, evolutionary progress, strenght-building and self-actualization. Towards that, forgetfulness plays a major role.

Of course, forgetfulness includes forgiveness. Or is it forgiveness prods forgetfulness ? These two are not the same. We must understand the underpinnings of forgiveness, however, since forgiveness is a willing act of forgetfulness and reconstruction of memory.

In order to forget and forget, we must reconstruct the neural pathways of memory.

To put out the new (forgive) it is necessary to throw out the old (forget). Or is it the other way around ? Kind of a chicken-and-the-egg issue.

To forgive effectively, we must be good at forgetting.

According to a recent study by “Paul Frankland, a senior fellow in CIFAR’s Child & Brain Development program, and Blake Richards, an associate fellow in the Learning in Machines & Brains program, our brains are actively working to forget.” -study cited in Forgetting can make you smarter

Quote of the day: “We are blessed with good fortune.”-Agron to Spartacus, as thunder signals approaching storm upon Vesuvius.
Spartacus replies: “Good fortune ? Free men create their own” –Spartacus series

Key takeaway: We must help our brains forget better and faster. (yes I know, everybody else is telling you the exact opposite:  learn to remember better and defeat forgetfulness). If you’ve read something and hours and days later “you’re in a fog” about it, it probably wasn’t worth reading it.

If you read the article, you see that generalization works out against you.

Children, “whose hippocampi are producing more new neurons [than adult hippocampi], forget so much information.” Can you point fingers on children for memory loss ? Hardly. Memory loss, amnesia and dementia are the pride of the elderly. Yet children forget like a drunk on his 6th margarita.

What does science say about forgiveness ?

“Forgiveness is understood in this model as a shift in interpersonal motivation, marked by reduced retaliatory sentiment, decreased avoidant sentiment, and/or increased goodwill toward the transgressor. This shift in interpersonal motivation has the ultimate purpose of realizing long-term benefits of continued, productive interaction, and may be contingent upon improved treatment by the transgressor (McCullough et al., 2013).

Empirical tests of the evolutionary forgiveness model thus far have frequently been longitudinal in nature (McCullough et al., 2010, 2014), although recent experimental work using both cognitive priming (Burnette et al., 2012) and a behavioral economics framework (Tabak et al., 2012), has generally supported the model. The neuroscientific literature, meanwhile, has begun to identify the neural correlates of social decision-making across an array of contexts, including those involving forgiveness, but rarely engages this evolutionary model of forgiveness directly.”- The Neural Systems of Forgiveness: An Evolutionary Psychological Perspective, May 10, 2017

To train in forgetfulness, we don’t need to to lose consciousness. We don’t need to receive shock therapy.

I train in prescriptive forgetting and planned obsolence.

Some people train in Gestalt psychology.

Shouldn’t you ?