Imagine if you could delete bad memories. Well, you can | Ed Cooke

A new study shows that it's possible to deliberately forget things. It turns out that's a surprisingly useful life skill

A mental adventure familiar to most students is that of cramming one's mind with knowledge in the run up to an exam. Once the exam is done, we gleefully evacuate our brain of all this hard-won learning that's no longer needed. Within days, we can barely remember the subject matter, let alone the details. At such moments, it's as if we've forgotten on purpose.

It might then come as a surprise to learn that until recently, there was little scientific evidence that people could have any deliberate influence on their rates of forgetting. But in the last few years, a small family of experimental techniques have showed that, under the right conditions, we can in fact deliberately forget things. The effects are subtle, but nonetheless suggestive: being able to forget at will would, after all, be a killer life skill.