The Two Mental Superpowers

There are two superpowers that separate the ordinary from the extraordinary: The power to learn, and the power to forget.

The power to learn should be relatively non-controversial. It is what we call “intelligence” or “smarts”, and all else being equal, the person who can learn faster and more completely will succeed to greater heights than another who learns more slowly or partially. As people age, many will exhibit declining speed and accuracy of learning, which in turn limits the remaining potential of the person in the remainder of his life. Note though that I believe the declining power to learn with age is a primarily a self-fulfilling prophecy or a psychosomatic effect. The vast majority of people fail to learn quickly after a certain age (be it 25 or 30 or 45 or 60) because they convince themselves that it is no longer possible to learn as quickly. In matters of the mind especially, belief and faith have dominating power. But another contributing factor to a real decline in the power to learn with age is a lack of the second power.

The power to forget refers to the intentional ability to discard remembered information that is untrue, outdated, or trivial. Examples of information that one would benefit from forgetting include fake news from propaganda websites, details of organic chemistry synthesis methods (assuming you’re not an organic chemist), and your middle school ID number. The power to forget does not refer to the unintended loss of memories from neurodegenerative diseases, the latter of which is more accurately a curse than a power. The irony of the power to forget is that it is very difficult to actively practice or train at it, because biologically the more one tries to forget something, the more they end up thinking about it and reinforcing the memory. Put another way, the power to forget is also correlated with low Neuroticism in the Big5 Personality Test.

The power to forget is critical to long-term success because throughout our lives, no matter how careful/skeptical/rational we are, we will be fed some misinformation. Permanently having that misinformation guide our decision-making will lead to poor outcomes. The misinformation could be well-intended (for example from Chinese parents who encourage their children to seek ultra-safe jobs), or it could be factually wrong based on the best understanding at the time (for example dietary cholesterol https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/dietary-cholesterol-does-not-matter), or malicious deceit (for example sown dissension by a saboteur). Additionally, as our social and career positions and interests change over time, many pieces of true information that were critical at one point is no longer helpful. As an example, Janet and Jinny asked me at one point if I could draw the chemical structure of DNA from memory — I failed. But this is not a bad thing in my mind.

Even if immortality is one day achieved through digital uploading rather than biological rejuvenation, there is benefit to forgetting, because the computational burden and lag of processing too much useless information when making a decision would lead to a competitive disadvantage. So if you realize that you no longer remember some details from your childhood, don’t fret the onset of decrepitude and don’t aim to recreate or re-remember those trivia. Celebrate the fact that you have the rare second superpower.