获得24.3k好评的回答@Dean Yeong：

The world is so full of creeping dementia that forgetting feels ominous. If learning is building up skills and knowledge, then forgetting is losing some of what was gained. It seems like the enemy of learning.

世界上有这么多反应慢的痴呆以至于遗忘让人感觉很不好。如果学习是在积累技巧和知识，那么遗忘就是丢掉已经得到的东西，它似乎是学习的敌人。

It's not. The truth is nearly the opposite.

其实不然，事实上恰恰相反。

One upside of forgetting is that it is nature’s most sophisticated spam filter. It's what allows the brain to focus, enabling sought-after facts to pop to mind.

遗忘的一个好处就是它是自然中最复杂的过滤器，它能让大脑集中注意力，使大脑能想起最想找的信息。

We engage in this kind of focused forgetting all the time without giving it much thought. To lock in a new computer password, we must block the old one from coming to mind; to absorb a new language, we must hold off the corresponding words in our native tongue.

我们一直在进行这种集中注意力的遗忘却不自知。为了记住新的电脑密码，我们必须忘掉旧的；为了学习新的语言，我们就不能去想母语里相同意思的词。

As the 19th century American psychologist William James observed：If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as we remembered nothing.

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