A study lead author Jeremy Manning, assistant professor at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, US said, “We used fMRI ( functional magnetic resonance imaging) to track how much people were thinking of scene-related things at each moment during our experiment. That allowed us to track, on a moment-by-moment basis, how those scene or context representations faded in and out of people’s thoughts over time.

Then, Right after they were told to forget, the fMRI showed that they “flushed out” the scene-related activity from their brains. “It’s like intentionally pushing thoughts of your grandmother’s cooking out of your mind if you don’t want to think about your grandmother at that moment,” Manning said. “We were able to physically measure and quantify that process using brain data,” Manning noted.

But when the researchers told participants to remember the studied list rather than forget it, this flushing out of scene-related thoughts did not occur. Further, the amount that people flushed out scene-related thoughts predicted how many of the studied words they would later remember, which shows the process is effective at facilitating forgetting