Question: how do we surpress memories?

Carolyn McGettigan answered on 24 Mar 2010:

hi Josh,

Here’s my answer to a similar question that someone else posted:

There has been some work trying to see whether people can ’suppress’ their memories. Some of these studies have been in the context of simple lab experiments, where different cueing methods were used to see if you could encourage people to ‘forget’ things they saw before, like lists of words. There was some evidence that these approaches can work. However, it seems there is a lot of debate about this – it would be good if Mariana were still around in this zone to help out on this topic!

But we humans don’t just go around learning lists of words in life. There may be very good reasons why we shouldn’t try to *suppress* memories for past events, even if these are bad, but rather talk through them and understand them. I guess that is the kind of thing that psychologists know much more about than neuroscientists do.