text: A mental adventure familiar to most students is that of cramming one’s mind with knowledge in the run up to an exam. Once the exam is done, we gleefully evacuate our brain of all this hard-won learning that’s no longer needed. Within days, we can barely remember the subject matter, let alone the details. At such moments, it’s as if we’ve forgotten on purpose. 
   
   It might then come as a surprise to learn that until recently, there was little scientific evidence that people could have any deliberate influence on their rates of forgetting. But in the last few years, a small family of experimental techniques have showed that, under the right conditions, we can in fact deliberately forget things. The effects are subtle, but nonetheless suggestive: being able to forget at will would, after all, be a killer life skill. 
   
   But how does deliberate forgetting work? An exciting new study sheds light on the question. 
   
   Jeremy Manning and Kenneth Norman have been doing wonderful work on memory for years, and in a remarkably cunning experiment, they provide evidence that we forget things by discarding the mental context within which those memories were first learned. 
   
   Sticky brain or memory like a sieve? | Ben Ambridge Read more 
   
   The study is a sophisticated one, and it’s worth reading the original here (methods sections are always the best bit, FYI). But in essence, they instructed people to deliberately remember or forget words they’d just learned. And they then spied on the brain to see what happened next. 
   
   What they observed is that the brain that attempts to remember keeps active the mental context that was present during the learning – whereas the brain that tries to forget discards that context, letting go of the mental scaffolding that had (probably) supported the construction of those memories in the first place. 
   
   That context is the key to forgetting is striking, and makes intuitive sense, since it’s also the key to remembering. The most powerful memory technique of all is the “memory palace”, which is precisely an instrument that exploits the powers of spatial context to enhance memory. By imagining objects around sequences of locations (contexts), we can then recall those memories by visiting those contexts. 
   
   In more familiar territory, a fundamental rule of hosting a good party is to make sure the event transitions through several rooms or locations. Parties that unfurl all in the same space become a mess of disorganised memory; by contrast, when a party transitions through a series of differentiated contexts, such variety is soon reflected in memory, and one can recall precisely what one experienced in each location, enjoying each moment for its own recollected merits. 
   
   And of course, the quality of an experience correlates almost exactly with how well it sits in memory. Our most magical and meaningful experiences tend to include lots of doubt and suffering at the time. But such vulgar details dim in memory, and when the golden burst of meaning and friendship at the top of the tiring mountain path, for instance, is all that remains of a remembered adventure, we know that it was a wonderful time. 
   
   Too many neurons spoil the memory Read more 
   
   It’s sometimes said that we live in an age that doesn’t value memory, which would seem to be rather worrying in light of the vital role of memory in meaning. I don’t completely agree with this concern (the world’s never been more memorable), but this study on the importance of context in remembering and forgetting can attune us to at least one way in which we might do better with our experience. 
   
   
   
   Consider how we now tend to photograph the most important moments in our lives rather than just drinking them in. When we do this, we diminish our first-hand experience, confident that by having stored (and perhaps shared) a photo, we’ve logged the moment. That leaves us much less likely to directly remember the original experience, allowing the photo to do our remembering for us. 
   
   The result is that our lives become ever more biased in favour of the visual and the shareable. Vision is the most dispassionate, the least emotional, of all the modalities, and what we share inevitably biases our recollections towards moments where we seemed beautiful and happy, as opposed to those when we actually were. So our recollected lives become thinner, and less truthful. 
   
   This mode of living is what the late Doris McIlwain called Living Palely, and I highly recommend reading her call for us to rationally embrace irrational emotion in order to live, and remember, fully. 
   
   Perhaps, one day, we will all be able to remember at will the best parts of life and forget the parts that hold us back. There are techniques at our disposal to help us do both. But they require more than just changing the way we relate to our memories – they require us to tweak the way we live. And that is no small feat. ||||| Photo 
   
   The leaders of the independent commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks, former Governor Tom Kean of New Jersey and former Representative Lee Hamilton of Indiana, carried out that highly sensitive task with integrity and rigor. 
   
   Now they are weighing in again as the Obama administration prepares to make public at least some of the 28 pages from a separate, earlier investigation by a congressional panel that examined possible Saudi government involvement in the attacks. The pages have been kept secret since 2002. 
   
   In a statement issued last Friday, Mr. Kean, the commission chairman, and Mr. Hamilton, the vice chairman, effectively delivered this bottom line to Americans: Be cautious in judging the material when it becomes available. 
   
   Former Senator Bob Graham, who was a co-chairman of the separate 2002 joint congressional inquiry into the attacks, has long claimed there is evidence of complicity by institutions and people in Saudi Arabia beyond the 15 Saudi nationals who were among the 19 Al Qaeda terrorists. Such allegations are adding new tensions to an already fraught Saudi-American relationship. 
   
   But Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Kean stress that, unlike their commission, the congressional panel never had a chance to investigate any of the leads contained in the 28 pages. Those pages were based mostly on raw, unvetted material from the F.B.I. and “therefore, are comparable to preliminary law enforcement notes, which are generally covered by grand jury secrecy rules. Those rules exist to avoid implicating people in serious crimes without the benefit of follow-up investigation to determine if such suspicions are substantiated,” they wrote. 
   
   The two men said they consider this point crucial since the attacks were the worst mass murder ever in the United States. “Those responsible deserve the maximum punishment possible. Therefore, accusations of complicity in that mass murder from responsible authorities are a grave matter. Such charges should be levied with care,” they added. 
   
   Their comments do not appear to be an attempt to whitewash any Saudi role. The 9/11 report was critical of Saudi Arabia: It cited the government’s funding of schools and mosques that fanned an extreme form of Islam known as Wahhabism, as well as contributions by some wealthy Saudis to Islamic charities with links to terrorism. 
   
   During its tenure, the commission investigated all leads in the 28 pages and only one Saudi government employee was implicated in the plot, Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton said. He was Fahad al Thumairy, who worked as an imam at a mosque in Los Angeles and was employed by the Saudi Ministry of Islamic Affairs. The commission found no evidence that Mr. Thumairy, who returned to Saudi Arabia in 2003, assisted two of the hijackers when they came to Los Angeles in 2000 but “he is still a person of interest,” they wrote. 
   
   When it wrapped up its investigation in 2004, the commission concluded that there was “no evidence that the Saudi government as an institution or senior Saudi officials individually funded” al Qaeda. In 2015, another independent panel created by Congress, the 9/11 Review Commission, found no new evidence against the Saudi government. 
   
   The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said on Monday that it was realistic to expect the administration to release at least some of the 28 classified pages by June. Whatever emerges must be weighed in the context of the work already done by Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton and their team.
target: – A member of the official commission that investigated the 9/11 attacks is ratcheting up pressure on the White House to make public 28 pages of a congressional report dealing with suspected Saudi involvement. In an interview with the Guardian, former Navy secretary John Lehman lays it out in blunt terms: “There was an awful lot of participation by Saudi individuals in supporting the hijackers, and some of those people worked in the Saudi government,” he says. “Our report should never have been read as an exoneration of Saudi Arabia.” Lehman adds that he's not implicating members of the Saudi royal family or top civilian officials, but rather lower-echelon employees, perhaps in the Saudi ministry of Islamic affairs. Last month, the leaders of the commission—former GOP Gov. Tom Kean of New Jersey and former Democratic congressman Lee Hamilton of Indiana—cautioned against releasing the 28 pages and noted that just one Saudi official had been implicated in the plot. (That was diplomat Fahad al-Thumairy, who was deported and remains a "person of interest," notes the New York Times.) But Lehman says he knows of at least five other Saudi employees who were under suspicion. “They may not have been indicted, but they were certainly implicated,” he says. “There was an awful lot of circumstantial evidence.”