BRAIN MATTERS

Science of forgetting: Why we’re already losing our pandemic memories

Because of information overload and the monotony of pandemic life, your brain may already be forgetting parts of the covid years

By Richard Sima

March 13, 2023 at 6:00 a.m.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2023/03/13/brain-memory-pandemic-covid-forgetting/

…Why we might forget a pandemic

Forgetting is inextricably intertwined with memory.

“A basic assumption that we can make is that everybody forgets everything all the time,” said Norman Brown, cognitive psychology professor researching autobiographical memory at the University of Alberta. “The default is forgetting.”

…Who wants to remember a pandemic?

Here’s another reason we forget: As a society, many people don’t want to hold onto their covid memories.

People tend to view the future more positively than the past, Rajaram said. This future-oriented positivity bias occurs because the future can be imagined in many ways compared to the past, which is fixed.

Emotionally evocative and dramatic events are more likely to be remembered, but even those memories fade and distort. Within a week of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Hirst and a consortium of researchers around the United States asked over 3,000 people in the United States to relate their experiences and feelings around the event.

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The risk of collectively forgetting another pandemic

How society decides to commemorate the pandemic will probably affect whether and how it lives in our society’s collective memory, and what future generations learn from our experiences.

While parents pass along their knowledge and family history to offspring, these communicative memories only last for two or three generations: we may know something about our grandmothers or even our great-grandmothers, but almost nothing further up our family tree.

Without cultural artifacts — books, movies, statues, museums — the same may happen for memories of the covid pandemic, consigned to the entropic dustbin of history. As of now, there are no official permanent memorials for the pandemic.