You finish a book and a month later you barely remember anything. Feels like wasted time, right?📚

It wasn't. Richards and Frankland (Neuron, 2017) argued that the brain isn't designed to remember accurately - it's designed to make good decisions. These are different goals.

Your brain forgets on purpose.

The opposite is actually a problem. Neuropsychologist Luria studied a man with near-perfect memory for 30 years. He could recall entire conversations from decades ago, and was crippled by it.
He couldn't generalize or extract the point of anything because every detail felt equally important.

So the book didn't disappear. It got compressed. The chapter titles and specific examples are gone but now you can recognize more patterns and shades in real life, without realizing.

The book is part of how you think now.

#mind