The Art of Forgetting

How do we forget? Why do we need to forget? This book intends to answer to these and other questions. It aims to demonstrate that each one is who it is due to their own memories. Thus, distinguish between the information we should keep from those we should forget is an difficult art. In this book, the author discusses about the different types of memory, the main types of forgetting (avoidance, extinction and repression), their brain areas and their mechanisms. In this sense, the art of forgetting, or the art of do not saturate our memory mechanisms, is something innate, that benefits us anonymously, keeping us from sinking amidst our own memories. The essays that compose this book go through several aspects, since individuals to societies' memory. By the end of the book, the reader will be able to understand that we forget to be able to think, to live and to survive.

Iván Izquierdo is a physician, professor and neuroscientist. Born in Argentina, but naturalized Brazilian, he lives in Porto Alegre for almost 30 years. He taught and lectured in several institutions, among them the University of Buenos Aires, the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul - where he helped to create the post-graduation program in Biochemistry - and the Pontifícia Universidade de Porto Alegre - where he is director of the Memory Center, at the Brain Institute. Members of several academies and scientific societies in Brazil and around the world, he have received more than fifty awards, both nationally and internationally and published more than 500 articles in his carrier. He is one of the most respectable specialists on memory physiology worldwide and have discovered the main molecular mechanisms for creation, evocation, persistence and extinction of memory. Izquierdo outstands as one of the most cited Brazilian scientists in any field of research.