forgetfulness

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forgetfulness

The usual natural consequence of inattention or of overburdening a well-stocked mind with trivia. Failure to retrieve a memory becomes more likely the larger the number of similar memories that depend on the same cues. Abnormal (pathological) forgetfulness is the main feature of DEMENTIA and of AMNESIA. forme fruste, a disease at an early stage, or arrested by treatment, prior to the development of its full characteristics.

References in classic literature ?

And so, with mad antics, leaping, reeling, and over-balancing, we danced and sang in the sombre twilight of the primeval world, inducing forgetfulness, achieving unanimity, and working ourselves up into sensuous frenzy.

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Crossing glittering avenues, she went into the throng emerging from the places of forgetfulness.

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She smiled, as if in pity at her own momentary forgetfulness, discovering by the act a row of teeth that would have shamed the purest ivory; when, replacing the veil, she bowed her face, and rode in silence, like one whose thoughts were abstracted from the scene around her.

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for that there was no atonement; but though forgiveness was impossible, forgetfulness was possible still, and he was determined to forget, to stamp the thing out, to crush it as one would crush the adder that had stung one.

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Her affection for him was now the breath and life of Tess's being; it enveloped her as a photosphere, irradiated her into forgetfulness of her past sorrows, keeping back the gloomy spectres that would persist in their attempts to touch her--doubt, fear, moodiness, care, shame.

A spiritual forgetfulness co-existed with an intellectual remembrance.

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It seems as though the brightest side of everything were also its highest and best, so that as our little lives sink back behind us into the dark sea of forgetfulness, all that which is the lightest and the most gladsome is the last to sink, and stands above the waters, long in sight, when the angry thoughts and smarting pain are buried deep below the waves and trouble us no more.

Do you remember Dickens' "Haunted Man"--how he prayed for forgetfulness, and how, when his prayer was answered, he prayed for memory once more?

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And thus, Glaucon, the tale has been saved and has not perished, and will save us if we are obedient to the word spoken; and we shall pass safely over the river of Forgetfulness and our soul will not be defiled.

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More miserable than man ever was before, why did I not sink into forgetfulness and rest?

My father, who was watching over me, perceiving my restlessness, awoke me; the dashing waves were around, the cloudy sky above, the fiend was not here: a sense of security, a feeling that a truce was established between the present hour and the irresistible, disastrous future imparted to me a kind of calm forgetfulness, of which the human mind is by its structure peculiarly susceptible.

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To attribute the cause of this problem to simple forgetfulness would amount to dismissing all the other aspects that coalesce to breed this form of neglect, such as a frenetic pace of living, the fragmenting nature of parental multitasking, the myriad stresses and strains of daily life in a parent's life that depreciate his or her focus and concentration on any one task at any given moment.