In some models, there are more than 30 distinct "trance depths" from lightly suggestible to the ability to forget words, not see an object, see something change color, not notice pain, or "fall asleep" on command.
And visits to my in-laws would not be complete without a ravenous trawl through my father-in-law's Scandi thrillers (I have a happy ability to forget whodunits between times, which makes me – at least in book terms – a cheap date) and my husband's comics.
The β factor thus gives the system an ability to forget outdated or unreliable knowledge.
Perhaps it is this ability to forget that makes us such an optimistic and eternally hopeful people.
In his pioneering 19th-century book on nationalism, "What is a Nation?", Ernest Renan pointed out that the idea of the nation was based on shared habits and language but also on a shared ability to forget past hatreds.
Relatedly, we read in Dry Rations that "a human being survives by his ability to forget", but the statement is made ironical by appearing within a story that is itself a conscious act of remembrance.
Much of Sicily Unpacked's charm derives from its presenters' seeming ability to forget the camera: keeping voice-over to a minimum, Graham-Dixon and Locatelli discuss what they see between themselves.
It's a rare quality – the ability to forget yourself and identify with another person.
In the mid-1990s, for example, researchers found that a particular receptor for the neurotransmitter glutamate--the so-called NMDA receptor--plays a critical role both in rats' ability to learn that a flash of light signals an impending electrical shock and in their ability to forget their fear of the light after the researchers stop pairing flash with zap.
The purpose of this study was to validate the 'Forgotten Joint' score (FJS-12), a 12-item questionnaire designed to analyze the patient's ability to forget the joint in everyday life, in French and to compare the results of this Patient Reported Outcome (PRO) score in patients who had other than total joint arthroplasties.
