When Being Forgetful Can Actually Benefit You, From A Neurologist

Colloquially, "to create" implies novelty or innovation; "to be creative" suggests a broader generative capacity. But the recurrent theme that epitomizes the creative process is not generating something brand-new out of the blue: Rather, a creative spark occurs when unexpected associations among existing elements are suddenly forged—a sort of cognitive alchemy.

Psychologists set out to devise a behavioral task that captures this creative crucible1. Consider the following three words: elephant, lapse, vivid. Think of a fourth word that relates to all three. The answer is memory. How about a word that is associated with another trio: rat, blue, cottage? If you answered cheese, you are right. But even if you did not, take a moment to reflect on these two answers. Once you put the words together and come up with or are shown the right answer, its accuracy is obvious, and you experience an aha-moment. 

There is no obvious route a mind must take, no formula for how to cognitively compute the right answer. It just happens. The correct answer is always there, somewhere in your cortex. You know that rats eat cheese; you have eaten, or at least seen, blue cheese or cottage cheese. But if you were asked to free-associate to rat alone, cheese might not come first to your mind. Unless you are a cheesemonger, blue might elicit sky; cottage might spark house. Only if you are a pest control expert, a ratcatcher who has experimented with various baits, might the word cheese come first to your mind. Similarly, only if you are a memory expert, like me, might the word memory be your response to elephant, lapse, and vivid.

And this is exactly the point. Creativity requires preexisting associations—requires memory—but they must remain loose and playful. The artists' testimonials teach us that creative abilities are forged by immersion in various elements and the establishment of associations between them, but only when the links are relaxed. All visual artists immerse themselves in visions, poets in words, scientists in facts and ideas. But what sets the great ones apart is that their associations are not set in stone. 

Loosening associations, relaxing links, associations that are set in clay, not in stone: All are required for creativity, and all sound like forms of forgetting. Is this true?

Evidence that forgetting is beneficial for creativity2 first came from studies in which psychologists used various ways to either strengthen or loosen associations between word pairs, like "blue–sky" or "cottage–house." For example, by repeatedly exposing subjects to word pairs, researchers found that they formed tighter memories between those couplets and predictably initially performed worse on the creativity task. Subjects' performance gradually improved over the next few days, however, an improvement that tracked with forgetting's known timeline. 

While those findings are interesting, other evidence that links forgetting to creativity3 comes from sleep studies. These studies clearly show that our creativity, whether measured by the creativity word task, or on other measures, significantly benefits from a good night's sleep and, in particular, from our dreaming. And when examined, this benefit did not occur because sleeping is somehow restful. Nor did it occur because dreaming happens to sharpen a few memory snippets of what our minds were exposed to throughout our daily peregrinations.

Most of the studies were performed before the definitive evidence validated Francis Crick's prediction that we sleep in order to forget much of our quotidian memories4. Nevertheless, with the benefit of scientific hindsight, the inescapable conclusion is that we are most creative when associations of what we do remember are kept loose and playful by sleep-induced forgetting.