So-called incubation effects refer to better resolution of an initially unsolved problem after putting the problem aside rather than working on it continuously. Although the effect is a familiar experience to most people, and the term appeared in 1926, incubation was not observed reliably in laboratory studies until the late twentieth century, when research began to focus on causes of and relief from fixation. We review research on incubation effects in creative problem solving, divergent thinking, and memory recovery. Although the term “incubation” erroneously implies the underlying mechanism is unconscious work, we refer to the beneficial effect of a break as an “incubation effect.” We review research showing that creative responses can be blocked by more dominant ones, a fixation effect, and forgetting dominant responses can enable incubation effects. Forgetting fixating responses can occur via temporal delays, retrieval inhibition, and context shifts, all of which can lead to incubation effects. Future research may discover what activity during the incubation interval is optimal for incubation effects, and should also examine the moments preceding an insight experience, a nascent period that may occur when one returns to an unsolved problem after fixation has been diminished.

Taking Penelope’s exemplary remembering of Odysseus as its point of departure, this final chapter argues that Sappho’s lyrics shift the focus of women’s remembering from male to female objects, in this way creating an “avuncular” variation on the Odyssey’s conjugal paradigm. The fragments examined display the “sisterly” dynamics that exist alongside marriage – something the Odyssey itself does not explore. Sappho’s fragments feature the girls and women that wives once were before they were married. The bonds that remembering sustains in Sappho’s world exist alongside the vertically inflected (conjugal, maternal) relationships that more visibly defined a woman’s life. The scenes of recollection are appropriately adorned with lightly woven wreathes, fabrics, flowers, fragrant oils, suggesting the precariousness and fragility of these bonds, in comparision with the supposed enduringness of marriage and patrilineal lineage, with its accumulated household wealth passed on from one generation to the next.

Time, and how we relate to it, is a persistent theme throughout Kierkegaard’s writings. Particularly striking is the way in which Kierkegaard depicts various pathologies of temporal experience, showing how various strategies for dealing with time are ultimately self-defeating. Either/Or is perhaps the single best example of a text in which Kierkegaard problematizes time and our responses to it. The book is famously presented as staging a clash between two views of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. But it can also be understood as presenting and critiquing two different ways of relating to time: one that tries to evade the responsibility entailed by living in time and one that tries to anchor itself in an eternity that is ultimately a denial of finitude. The text suggests both approaches to time are doomed, and that a different, specifically religious relation to time is required.

Editors and critics have struggled to place The Merry Wives of Windsor within the framework of Shakespeare’s chronicle history plays, and it is often said that the Falstaff of Merry Wives is a different character from that of the histories. Merry Wives can be seen as part of a multiverse, of incompatible timelines in which characters are both entirely familiar and somehow altered. In the multiverse of Merry Wives, both public and private histories are apparently erased. While the history plays are burdened by almost pathological remembrance and rumination, the world of Merry Wives shows the advantages of amnesia.

The Insatiate Countess sounds an alarm against the allure of the lusty widow exploited by early modern English comedy. On the stage, the nubile widow provided the audience’s younger sons and poor unmarried men with the opportunity to fantasize about the windfall of socioeconomic privilege normally reserved for those blessed with primogeniture. Marston’s tragedy strips bare this fantasy of securing a legacy that will leave an impression on social memory. It does so by dramatizing the detrimental effects the widow’s extraordinary concupiscence has on two primary memory arts for perpetuating male identity: commemoration (the remembrance of the dead husband) and nosce te ipsum (the remembrance of the male self). For all its dire warnings, the plot’s finale, however, cannot resolve the troubling contradiction of the countess’s lustful body: the “insatiate” widow induces men to forget themselves and simultaneously and inescapably constitutes the vehicle through which patriarchal memorialization depends for its continuity.

When Never Let Me Go was published in 2005, Ishiguro indicated that he ‘remain[ed] fascinated by memory’, and that his next challenge was to examine the themes of national memory and forgetting. The Buried Giant, published in 2015, represents Ishiguro’s unique meditations on collective memory, understanding, and the complexities of forgetting. Utilizing a third-person narrative voice, Ishiguro orchestrates a post-Arthurian landscape of buried slaughter and collective amnesia, whilst engaging in a critical enquiry into the nature of shared memories in relationships. This chapter will begin by considering Ishiguro’s memory work in his earlier novels, before an investigation into the fallibility of memory and understanding precipitated by the enigmatic mist. This is followed by an exploration of the question of culpability and the complexities of collective memory. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the figure of the boatman, the island of forgetting, and the implications of an enforced forgetting.

In his Holy Sonnets, Donne seeks to forget rather than remember his sins, begging God for ‘a heavenly Lethean flood’ to ‘drown’ his ‘sin’s black memory’ and implying that his very salvation may depend upon it: ‘That Thou remember them, some claim as debt; / I think it mercy if Thou wilt forget’. Such a desire for divine oblivion would seem to be the very inverse of the theologian Dr Donne’s well-known assertion that ‘the art of salvation is but the art of memory’, yet, this chapter argues, they are intimately joined in the Holy Sonnets. This chapter explores how the speaker’s uncertainty about his salvation connects the ‘art of death’ (ars moriendi) with the ‘art of memory’ (ars memorativa) as a mnemonic poetics of ruin and recollection. The transformation of the art of memory into an art of salvation in Augustine’s Confessions is central not only to Donne’s reputation as a ‘second St Augustine’ but also to the poetics of memory that shape the Holy Sonnets. Donne constructs the Holy Sonnets as a memory theatre in which to enact the drama of salvation by performing the role of Doctor Faustus, a part drawn from both Augustine’s Confessions and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.

This introductory chapter situates the current study within the existing literature on the contested events of 1857 and highlights how a focus on the way in which the conflict became an almost obsessively commemorated event in colonial and postcolonial contexts can help us better understand a range of questions pertaining to identity, legitimacy, and power as successive generations (re)produced and (re)packaged the past for mass consumption in the constantly evolving present. In so doing, this chapter also outlines the methodological framework which will inform the study as a whole. Drawing on sociological accounts of ‘collective memory’, this chapter develops a socially grounded understanding of the relationship between memory and forgetting, and explains how practices of commemoration provide a moment in which this dynamic is played out.

The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the various kinds of memories we can have, when and why we forget, and how good systems and technology can help us. The chapter starts with the story of Lenny LeClair, a man permanently disabled after surgeons forgot multiple sponges in his abdomen. The story ends with a question: How could doctors forget something with such high consequences? And how could they forget so frequently? The examples move to even more dire consequences: people who were forgotten by dive boats while out scuba diving. Some lived, many died. I end with an example from my own life: forgetting to go for a run after a successful 1,580 days of a running streak. Again, the question is how we can forget such important information. I talk about how to avoid memory errors and failures. Tactics include memory training, such as using the method of loci to remember information. Lastly, I cover false memories and how they are created with application areas in police questioning of witnesses, especially children, and the horrors of the "recovered memory movement" thirty years ago.

The first part of the introduction explores how historians and literary scholars have approached early modern memory and sketches the trajectory of recent work on the memory of the English and European Reformations. It then examines the ways in which the religious revolution transformed the memorial culture it inherited from the medieval past and the manner in which it engendered new strategies of remembering and forgetting, commemoration and amnesia. The second section explains the architecture and structure of the volume, which is divided into four parts (1) Events and Temporalities; (2) Objects and Places (3) Lives and Afterlives; (4) Bodies and Rituals. It probes the temporal; spatial and material; biographical; and ceremonial and corporeal dimensions of the memory of the English Reformation, establishing a series of conceptual frameworks for the essays that follow. The Reformation is reconceptualised less as a unitary moment of rupture than as ongoing struggle to reconfigure the nation’s ecclesiastical and cultural heritage and to accommodate the unruly legacy of the past. A prolonged development involving impulses towards both historical preservation and oblivion, it continues to be refought in memory and the imagination.

To allow identification of stimuli, sensory input is initially held briefly in sensory memory. It is then held in a short-term store (STS), where it can receive the additional processing required to form a permanent memory. The existence of separate short- and long-term stores is supported by research on amnesia, demonstrating that brain damage can affect one but not the other. Forgetting in STS may be caused by decay, and by interference from other memories. STS can hold information retrieved from long-term memory when required for activities such as reading; to reflect this, it is now called working memory. Baddeley proposed that working memory has 3 components: the phonological loop, visuo-spatial sketch pad, and central executive. Consolidation theory suggests that the formation of a permanent memory requires time for the strengthening of synaptic connections; there also appears to be a consolidation process that can occur over years. We cannot attend to all the stimuli that seek entry into working memory; change blindness provides a striking example. Some theories suggest that selection occurs early in processing, others that attention can be allocated flexibly after stimuli have been identified. With practice, processing can become automatic, so that stimuli no longer require attention.

Memories may spontaneously decay over time, but the main cause of forgetting appears to be interference from other memories. Many apparently lost memories are still in storage, but preceding and following events can both make it harder to find them (proactive and retroactive interference), especially if the memories are similar. Retrieval is more likely insofar as our current environment—including our emotions—resembles the original; stimuli that were present then can act as retrieval cues, reactivating associated memories. If a retrieval cue is associated with many memories, however, it is less likely to activate any one of them (cue overload). While a memory is being activated, it may automatically inhibit competing memories (retrieval-induced forgetting), and we can also suppress memories deliberately. If we are only able to activate fragments of a memory, we may unconsciously reconstruct the original, and research on the misinformation effect, source confusion, and reality monitoring has shown how flawed this reconstruction can be, in some cases leading us to confidently recall events that never occurred. The combination of constructive processes during perception and reconstruction during retrieval mean that our memories are more like rough sketches of events than detailed photographs.

Science explains how marijuana produces the experience of being high after Herkenham mapped location of the densest concentrations of CB1 receptors. The hippocampus, amygdala, and basal ganglia/cerebellum have especially dense cannabinoid receptors and THC impacts the functions produced by these areas in conspicuously noticeable ways. The hippocampus produces short term memory, an important element in learning. Reduced working memory is the most documented cognitive impairment caused by acute marijuana use. The endocannabinoid system is also uniquely responsible for forgetting negative experiences. The amygdala modulates anxiety, appetites, the sense of novelty and the hypothalamus. When THC stimulates the amygdala, most people experience relaxation, hunger (“munchies”) and altered sensory experience due to dishabituation to stimuli. Hypothalamic modulation by the amygdala results in reduction of the stress response, leading to the “chill” of being high. And genetic differences in CB1 density determines aspects of temperament. Supranormal stimulation of CB1 receptors in the basal ganglia reduces spontaneous motor activity and THC stimulation of the cerebellum reduces fine motor control and alters the sense of time and driving skills. The experience of being high is the culmination of altered brain function in the above areas with the highest CB1 density.