Brain: the trick to “delete” information from your memory

Your memory saturated? Are you tired of ruminating on useless information? To take your head on a detail? Discover an effective method to finally vacuum your brain and keep only what is useful to you.

Positive or negative thoughts that flow, a lot of information that arrives daily… By force, our brain can end up saturating! What if we just hit a “delete” button to make room in our brain in an instant, and thereby lighten our memory?

The American magazine Fast Company reveals, based on the work of Judah Pollackn, co-author of The Chaos Imperative and Olivia Fox Cabane, author of The Charisma Myth, how to make the vacuum in his head.

If your brain is saturated, the trick, relayed by GQ, is to think only about important things and take naps for 10 to 20 minutes.

Assuming that our neurons function like plants in a garden, it is important, like gardeners, to prune space regularly. ‘Imagine that your brain is a garden, except that instead of growing flowers, fruits and vegetables, you develop synaptic connections between neurons. These are the connections that neurotransmitters, like dopamine, serotonin etc., go through,’ the authors of the paper explain.

Previous studies have shown that the less widely used synaptic connections are labeled with a particular protein. When these markers are detected by cells, they are ‘destroyed’, thus freeing up space in the brain for new information.

And this sorting would be done “automatically” during your sleep, hence the famous phrase “the night carries advice”. But for the brain to erase the “right information”, the information you no longer want to have in mind, it would be enough to think only about the things that really matter to you during the day, and to put aside the parasitic and useless data, which take up space (for nothing) in your memory. This information you avoid thinking about will be marked as “unused” and then deleted…