The study results were published in the “Psychological Journal”. For a long time, forgetting was regarded as a negative trait of memory and an involuntary process. However, today scientists have changed their perspective. “Forgetting has a positive aspect: it helps cleanse the psyche of unnecessary or traumatic memories. There is also a suggestion that it is possible to manage forgetting,” said Olga Shcherbakova, a leading researcher at St. Petersburg State University.
According to her, metacognition—awareness of one’s cognitive processes and mastery of effective management techniques—can assist in controlling forgetting.
Within the framework of the metacognition concept, it is suggested that the effectiveness of memory work depends on monitoring and control processes, while forgetting is equated to the failure to retrieve information under their influence. Scientists hypothesized that through meditation as a form of mental training, these skills could be developed, thus enhancing the ability to intentionally forget.
To test this hypothesis, an experiment was conducted at St. Petersburg State University. They utilized open monitoring meditation, in which a person sequentially tracks their thoughts and tries not to evaluate them. The researchers invited 106 volunteers aged 18 to 35 to participate. All of them were familiar with the mentioned mental practice, but none had engaged in it on a regular basis.
The participants were divided into three groups: the first was to complete 30 meditations of approximately 20 minutes each over five weeks, the second performed the same number of pseudomeditations during the same period, while the third group did neither. The researchers at St. Petersburg State University created audio recordings of texts that participants listened to during the experiment.
Before and after the practices, the subjects completed a “think/not think” task, in which they had to stop emerging memories. They also took the Stroop test: they had to name the color printed in a font that did not match its meaning as quickly as possible. For example, the word “green” could be printed in any color other than green. Additionally, a structured interview was conducted. In it, participants selected from a proposed list the intentional forgetting strategies they used during the trials, such as: “I made sure that I knew the second word from the pair and tried not to think about it.”
As a result of the experiment, the scientists did not find a pronounced effect of meditation; however, they identified some differences in the magnitude of the Stroop effect (reaction time when reading words) and the effectiveness of intentional forgetting before and after the meditation sessions.
“Thus, we obtained only indirect confirmation that meditation influenced the effectiveness of intentional forgetting. According to the numerical data, participants did not improve their ability to forget information or complete the Stroop test faster,” explains Olga Shcherbakova. “However, after analyzing the data from the structured interview, we found that they changed their forgetting strategies from those that hinder it to those that facilitate it.”
According to Olga Shcherbakova, despite the essentially negative results, they still gained a greater understanding of how intentional forgetting works.