We’ve all suffered through the last-minute exam cram–that largely futile attempt to memorize as much as possible in the final minutes before a test. No matter how hard we try to remember it all, the information often disappears the minute we read the first question. Whereas forming memories is an active and often exhausting process, losing them seems to happen quite passively as time elapses and new information overloads our busy brains. But a new study published February 19 in the journal Cell shows that forgetting is a biochemically active process not unlike memory formation. [More]
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