There was a famous writer once who said that one of his greatest assets was his extreme forgetfulness. Appropriately, I am blanking on his name at the moment, but I'll pop back in here if I recall it. It was a long time ago.
However, his point was something like focusing on rote memorization of detail makes for trite, superficial, and boring fiction-writing, and that you're better off experiencing something as intensely as possible and then forgetting it almost immediately. The idea being that your brain will recall the crucial bits more relevantly and more vividly once they have been yanked back from the fog of utter forgetfulness. I'm not sure how closely related this is to the ideas presented in the article, but for me personally, it became significantly easier to write fiction with a real sense of "immediacy" once embracing this principle.
However, fiction can require a strange sort of learning: it can involve sensory knowledge of scattered quotidian detail. Back when I wrote a lot, things like the discrete texture and smell of different wooden tables were very interesting to me. Or exactly how it feels to be in a room lit by a single large fluorescent light vs other kinds of light. I'm not sure that kind of learning transfers to any other domain, really. But forgetfulness was very useful for it, at any rate. I'm done now.
However, his point was something like focusing on rote memorization of detail makes for trite, superficial, and boring fiction-writing, and that you're better off experiencing something as intensely as possible and then forgetting it almost immediately. The idea being that your brain will recall the crucial bits more relevantly and more vividly once they have been yanked back from the fog of utter forgetfulness. I'm not sure how closely related this is to the ideas presented in the article, but for me personally, it became significantly easier to write fiction with a real sense of "immediacy" once embracing this principle.
However, fiction can require a strange sort of learning: it can involve sensory knowledge of scattered quotidian detail. Back when I wrote a lot, things like the discrete texture and smell of different wooden tables were very interesting to me. Or exactly how it feels to be in a room lit by a single large fluorescent light vs other kinds of light. I'm not sure that kind of learning transfers to any other domain, really. But forgetfulness was very useful for it, at any rate. I'm done now.