I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear In Vivid, conversations about connecting and communicating.

Most of what happens in our brain not only and there are a lot of reasons to sleep is

to basically trim down our memories, to mow the lawn of memories so we wake up the following

day with a clean slate, able to be smarter, happier and better people.

That's Scott Small. As director of the Alzheimer's Disease Research Center at Columbia University,

he helps patients with memory loss. People who forget too much, but he's lately come to

appreciate that some forgetting is in fact essential to our being able to function at all.

And he's written a book about it called Forgetting, the benefits of not remembering.

This is going to be fun talking to you today because your book forgetting, your idea that

forgetting is a gift is probably something that most of us will say what in what ways

is it a gift?

Yeah, well the first thing I'll say Alan is that it was a surprise to me as well.

In other words, I would say even broader it was a surprise, it is a surprise to the field.

And by the field I mean people like me who have dedicated our careers to trying to cure

memory loss and association with disease. Even in the basic sciences, there's always

been the sense that forgetting is bad. We should fight it tooth and nail and more memories

always better. So that's been the really the canon.

And only in the last 10 years has that been shifted. And so it was interesting to me and

hopefully I articulate that and why that is in the book.

You begin early in the book with a reference to the story by Borges.

The memorial.

Good, did he make up that word? I never heard that word before.

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