Is Forgetting An Intentional Activity By The Body Or Not

I would not support that forgetting is an intentional activity by the body. This   is due to the preexisting theories backed up by scientific information and multitude of research explaining the reason why people forget.

One of the school of thought that explains forgetting as an involuntary process is that it’s due to organic causes. This is where by per-stored information in the long-term memory is lost due to destruction by either trauma, tumor or diseases such Alzheimer’s disease. In some cases, one of the organic causes involves the inability of the brain to carry out the encoding process. (Graf & Ohta, 2002)

Some scholars argue that in order remember we need cues from time to time so as to remember. Lack of such cues or reminders hinder our storage hence make us fail to recall. Such a process cannot be initiated but it occurs naturally.

One other expected way of dis-remembering that occurs in human is decline in memory with age. That’s why the elderly, hardly recall the immediate events in their lives compared to their youth era. This is due to nervous degeneration. The whole process is physiological, and is never under human control.

If people had the ability to control forgetting, they would initiate it whenever they want to forget the past negative events. This would mean there would be less counseling like now and stressed persons would be unheard of. (Segalen, 1995)

References

Graf, P., & Ohta, N. (2002). Lifespan development of human memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Segalen, V. (1995). A lapse of memory. Brisbane, Australia: Boombana Publications.