Our brains occasionally prune back cells
Summary
- Forgetting is normal and healthy.
Details
- In child development, this is known as synaptic pruning. Our brains occasionally clean up by killing off a bunch of cells
- This process is normal in living things as well as systems. Every now and then we need to clean up, or prune, or reorganize.
- We need to have something there before we can prune
References
Quotes
- But first, a reminder: forgetting is natural, normal, and healthy. There’s a fancy term for it in child development: synaptic pruning¹. But before you can prune, there must be something there. Something that was useful at least once, generally. The question is… when it might finally be useful, will you be able to find it again?