Every time I run around in my apartment looking for my lost keys, I curse my poor memory. The fact that I forgot where I put them is due to my brain not working as it should. That is at least what it feels like and, until recently, even memory researchers saw forgetfulness as the brain's inability to store new information.

But, in 2019, Japanese researchers studying mice discovered a group of brain cells that are active when the animals sleep.1 These cells, which are also found in humans, have a strange property: They suppress activity in the brain's memory center, the hippocampus. It begs the question: Why has Mother Nature bothered to put special cells in our brains that make us remember worse?

We get a clue from the Russian journalist Solomon Shereshevsky........

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