The Art of Forgetting, 2015

How do we forget? Why do we need to forget? This book intends to answer to these and other questions. It aims to demonstrate that each one is who it is due to their own memories. Thus, distinguish between the information we should keep from those we should forget is an difficult art. In this book, the author discusses about the different types of memory, the main types of forgetting (avoidance, extinction and repression), their brain areas and their mechanisms. In this sense, the art of forgetting, or the art of do not saturate our memory mechanisms, is something innate, that benefits us anonymously, keeping us from sinking amidst our own memories. The essays that compose this book go through several aspects, since individuals to societies' memory. By the end of the book, the reader will be able to understand that we forget to be able to think, to live and to survive.

1 ​Introduction.- 2. The art of forgetting 2.1 The formation and retrieval of memories 2.2 Forms of forgetting; first steps of the art. Extinction, repression, discrimination 2.3 Conditioned reflexes 2.4 The rapid forgetting of working memory is intrinsic to its nature 2.5 Brain areas and systems involved in the different types of memory; some basic notions of neuronal function 2.6 Executive functions 2.7 More on the connections between nerve cells 2.8 The forgetting of short- and long-term memory 2.9 Memory and emotions 2.10 More on memory and emotions: endogenous state dependency 2.11 The use and disuse of synapses 2.12 Failure of memory persistence as a form of forgetting? 2.13 Reconsolidation 2.14 Practicing memory 2.15Reading, knowledge, physical exercise, social life, memory and illness 2.16 The art of forgetting: a second approach 2.17 Denial and memory falsification 2.18 Forgetting by large populations 2.19 Surviving through neuronal death 2.20 The famous case of patient H.M. 2.21 When forgetting is not an art: amnesic patients 2.22 Anterograde amnesia by an interference with consolidation 2.23 Neuronal branching and the suppression of branching, neurogenesis and neuronal death as adaptive phenomena 2.24 The acquisition of new memories 2.25 Repression 2.26 A therapeutic use of the art of forgetting 2.27 Accessory memory devices: an adjunct to the art of remembering and to the art of forgetting.- 3. Summing up 3.1 Final comments.

Iván Izquierdo is a physician, professor and neuroscientist. Born in Argentina, but naturalized Brazilian, he lives in Porto Alegre for almost 30 years. He taught and lectured in several institutions, among them the University of Buenos Aires, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – where he helped to create the post-graduation program in Biochemistry – and the Pontifícia Universidade de Porto Alegre – where he is director of the Memory Center, at the Brain Institute. Members of several academies and scientific societies in Brazil and around the world, he have received more than fifty awards, both nationally and internationally and published more than 500 articles in his carrier. He is one of the most respectable specialists on memory physiology worldwide and have discovered the main molecular mechanisms for creation, evocation, persistence and extinction of memory. Izquierdo outstands as one of the most cited Brazilian scientists in any field of research.