A case for forgetfulness

Phones, wallets, sunglasses, keys. A box of cornflakes, even a ukulele and, once, a gate valve. These are among the things that passengers have forgotten in cabs in 2023, according to Uber India’s annual ‘Lost and Found Index’. Further insights suggest that Delhi is the most forgetful city in India, that people are most prone to absentmindedness in the evening — from 7 pm to 9 pm — and that the festive days around Diwali tend to make people more distracted than any other time of the year. No doubt this information is amusing, and even useful — one could, for example, learn to be vigilant about one’s belongings during the weary, post-work cab ride home. But the real lesson here is that forgetfulness is inevitable.

In Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, the American neuroscientist Lisa Genova explains that “a finely orchestrated balancing act between data storage and data disposal” is key to a well-functioning memory system. In other words, as much as remembering — to turn off the gas, your child’s smile when you return from work or that the deadline for filing tax returns is close — is necessary, so is forgetting — your score in Class X boards, the heartbreak of an early love or the time a colleague slighted you. In their own way, both help maintain sanity in an often overwhelming world. Consider the condition of the titular character in Jorge Luis Borges’s story ‘Funes the Memorious’ whose prodigious memory forced him to note the progress of decay, corruption, fatigue and death and doomed him to be “the solitary and lucid spectator of…an intolerably precise world”.