#MEMORY The Discipline of Forgetting: Light Transit through the Science of Literary Memory Victor Bermudez Tue fact that literature can be nurtured by forgetting seems to be a discovery of science. Memory has not just been an active literary theme since Homer; above all, the gestures of memory are found in the very structure of literary activity, perhaps because it is where a retrieval of the past and a projection of the imagination cohabit. That the future is involved in memory is something that, for example, the French poet Bernard Noel suggests when he says in Le livre de l'oubli (2012): 'just as the leaf is shed by the tree / and it forgets about it / the future needs tobe forgotten' (p. 10). Not far from this idea, philosophy also proposes tobe a legitimate channel for inquiry into logics of memory when Henri Bergson (2012) affirms the existence of the mind and matter and tries to determine the relationship between both by examining memory. However, it would be science that would back up or qualify philosophical-literary intuitions with its own methods. As a result of this, memory has focused its reflections on all the fields of thought; all we need to do is take a quick tour around some of the ideas that have passed through this attempt of human beings to know themselves. And underpinning all of this is forgetting. (Neuro)science of memory Certain significant contributions to the contemporary science of memory have been made by the neurophysiologist Eric Kandel. Not without philosophical consider- ations , his book, In Searchof Memory (2007), explains that the decisive disciplinary alliance for research about memory was formed in the 1970s between cognitive psychology - focused on the mind - and neuroscience - concentrated on the brain. This union led to the development of methods for the study of mental processes, 287