The Power of Forgetting by Mike Byster Read Free Book Online Page B

Rembrandt’s. Patterns of hydrogen and carbon make up water, patterns of frozen ice crystals make up snowflakes, patterns of snowfall give us ski paths, and so on. We can consider the cycles of daytime and nighttime a type of pattern, just as our bodies follow biological patterns that mesh with the twenty-four-hour solar day. We often don’t think of patterns existing on our insides, but these biological patterns actually dictate a lot about who we are and how we feel. Each one of us has a circadian rhythm—a biological clock—that maintains a steady, regular pattern twenty-four hours a day. We feel tired after the sun sets and charged when the sun comes up. These patterns often dictate the daily habits we keep. For example, most of us eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in a predictable pattern. In addition to our consistent habits and behaviors that abide by patterns of sleep and wakefulness, our bodies release hormones at different times of the day to sustain our biochemical activities.
    And of course patterns help give us computer programs, stories, and mathematics, which, as a matter of fact, is commonly described as the “science of pattern.” Any sequence of numbers that can be modeled by a mathematical function is considered a pattern. These can be the most difficult patterns to identify, but they make for excellent mind sharpeners, as we’ll see in part 2 .

WHAT’S IN A HABIT?
    You should know the answer to this already: patterns. Although we like to think we live exciting, ever-changing lives, we keep similar habits day in and day out from the time we get up to the people with interact with, the foods we gravitate toward, and the routes we use when we drive. As the old saying goes, humans are creatures of habit. But it’s not just the activities we perform consciously that are driven by habits; our brains can somewhat unconsciously command certain repeat actions that help maintain our survival—governing basic processes such as breathing, digesting, and pumping blood without our having to think about it. When you consider all the tasks you do in a day, you soon realize that you can get a lot done without much mental effort. Your morning routine today was likely a carbon copy of yesterday’s, and you probably managed to get ready for the day, eat breakfast, deal with trivial family stuff, and check off several to-dos quite effortlessly before 10:00 a.m. Most, if not all, of your mundane daily accomplishments are powered by habits—a systematic regimen that your brain is used to and can run pretty much on autopilot. Habits help us push through the day, and they become so ingrained in our lives that they are hard to break or change. They are as much shapers of our lives as we are shapers of our habits. As William James wrote in 1892, “All our life, so far as it has definite form, is but a mass of habits.”
    While it’s natural to think that habits are all about the things we remember to do, they are as much about forgetting. The whole purpose of a habit—a repeated pattern or activity—is to be able to perform a task without much mentaleffort or thought. This allows you to then focus on other information that might enter the brain and that requires your undivided attention and concentration. In other words, we don’t have to think about certain patterns in our lives that make up our habits. We can be “forgetful” in that department so we can save our mental bandwidth for other potential details that may need special treatment to get incorporated and remembered.
    In his brilliant treatise
The Power of Habit
, Charles Duhigg writes: “Most of the choices we make each day may feel like the products of well-considered decision making, but they’re not. They’re habits. And though each habit means relatively little on its own, over time, the meals we order, what we say to our kids each night, whether we save or spend, how often we exercise, and the way we organize our thoughts and work routines have