Long-Term Retention Requires Short-Term Forgetting

Just like successfully lifting a heavy weight forces your body to adapt to strengthen muscles, successfully recalling a fuzzy memory (lengthy wait) forces your brain to adapt to strengthen memory.

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Carl Hendrick recently posted a slide containing the following punchy quote:

“To retain learned material in the long term, we must first experience short-term forgetting.”

This might initially sound counterintuitive, but it’s actually pretty obvious. No matter what skill you’re training, the only way you improve your performance is by straining to overcome a challenge so that your body adapts to reduce the strain.

In the context of remembering, the way you introduce challenge is by making the memory harder to retrieve, and the way you do that is by allowing forgetting to set in (and also reducing the amount of priming in the stimulus that’s prompting the recall).

It’s so similar to weight training that you might as well call it wait training. Just like successfully lifting a heavy weight forces your body to adapt to strengthen muscles, successfully recalling a fuzzy memory (lengthy wait) forces your brain to adapt to strengthen memory.

You’re lifting a memory off the floor of long-term memory and raising it up into working memory. The fuzzier that memory, the harder it is to lift. The wait creates the weight.

This “wait-lifting” & weightlifting analogy is extended even further here: Spaced repetition is so similar to weight training that it might as well be called “wait” training.

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