BOOKS - FORGET IT

A neuropsychologist says that we're thinking about memory all wrong.

- JEROME GROOPMAN

Can Forgetting Help You Remember?

Four times a year, I attend the Yizkor service at synagogue. Yizkor in Hebrew denotes “remembrance,” and the official name of the service, Hazkarat Neshamot, means a “remembering of souls.” During the service, I call to mind loved ones who have died—parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, close friends—reliving shared times that were cherished, and some that were fraught. I think about what I learned from these people, several of whom were in my life from my first moments of awareness. I recall being taught to swim by my father, hearing my pious Russian grandmother’s tearful account of the Kishinev pogrom, standing by my father’s bedside as a medical student in an underequipped community hospital as he suffered a fatal heart attack. The Yizkor service at my synagogue ends with the Kaddish, the mourner’s prayer, and with a call to perform deeds of loving-kindness in memory of the departed.

Many religions and cultures have rituals structured around remembrance, a fact that suggests how central the ability to remember is to our sense of self, both as individuals and as communities. But how accurate are our memories, and in what ways do they truly shape us? And why does some of what we remember come to us easily, even unbidden, while other things remain maddeningly just out of reach, seeming to slip even further away the more we struggle to summon them?