Columbia University Irving Medical Center Who among us hasn’t worried when we’ve yet again misplaced our phone or reached back into the recesses of our mind for a familiar name and come up blank? Our culture bombards us with directives to boost our cognitive skills and train our brains to retain information, and mental slip ups can be alarming. We worry: Is this normal memory loss or the onset of dementia? Scott A. Small, MD, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center at Columbia University and author of a newly published book, Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering (Penguin Random House 2021), has a message: For most people, not only are memory lapses normal, they’re necessary for the functioning of a healthy brain-just as important as the ability to remember.