Colloquium

Dr. Michael Anderson, Senior Scientist and Programme Leader, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge

Title: Adaptive Forgetting for Mental Health

Abstract: To most people, forgetting is a human frailty — something to be avoided and overcome. But more often than we realize, forgetting is precisely what we want and need to do. In this talk, I describe a program of research examining how our tendency to attend to or ignore memories that come to mind shapes what remains accessible in long-term memory. I focus in particular on advances in our understanding of the cognitive, systems, and circuit mechanisms underpinning retrieval stopping — our ability to actively halt the recall of unwanted memories — and how this process enables us to forget the thoughts and memories we would prefer not to have. Building on this understanding, we have developed and tested an intervention that trains people to suppress fearful thoughts about the future, significantly improving mental health outcomes, especially in patients high in anxiety and post-traumatic stress. These findings argue that forgetting, far from being a frailty, is an essential capacity for achieving resilience to life's stresses — and that deficits in adaptive forgetting underlie intrusive thinking across a range of psychological disorders.