Have you ever left your keys or phone behind without realizing it? Being forgetful is usually associated with a lack of intelligence because it is considered difficult to focus or be thorough about something. At least that's how it's usually portrayed in movies and TV shows. But, did you know that being forgetful can be a sign that you're a genius?
A new study published in the medical journal Neuron shows that forgetting the little things is normal. This is a sign of a healthy brain and indicates that the brain is making room for more useful information later on. That's why geniuses are always forgetful because they think too much and that's why they override every single thing they remember.
A study published in 2017 by two researchers Paul Frankland and Blake Richards, conducted from the Univerity of Toronto (U&T), concluded that being forgetful can actually be beneficial to your intelligence. To come up with these findings, Paul and Blake analyzed various studies on memory, memory loss, and brain activity in humans and animals. One of the studies they analyzed mentioned that when new brain cells are fed information in the hippocampus, the new connections overlap with old memories and make them harder to access. The hippocampus itself is the part of the brain that deals with new things.
But still, if people are forgetting important things at an alarming rate, then that is worrying and goes against the 'positive effect' that the study is referring to. The study claims that forgetting some details of what happened once in a while is a sign of a healthy memory system, which is working well.
So we can conclude, that actually when you become forgetful of small things, it is a sign that your brain is smart and filtering out which information is important to retain and which is not.
