An Idea

 "What is the most resilient parasite? A bacteria? A virus? An intestinal worm? An idea. Resilient. Highly contagious. Once an idea has taken hold of the brain, it’s almost impossible to eradicate. An idea that is fully formed, fully understood, that sticks. Right in there somewhere."

 This quote from Christopher Nolan's Movie, 'Inception' is one of the best ways to define an idea. Why are we made like this? Why can't we just forcefully forget an idea?

 The answer lies in our evolution. We, humans, are social animals, we communicate for about 70-80% of our waking hours. So, which means that we somehow, directly or indirectly acquire knowledge for most of our time. We have evolved in such a way that our brain tries its best to not let any detail or knowledge go to waste. 

But the question is, 'why can't we forcefully forget an idea?'

The answer is, first of all, our brain has got two subunits, consciousness and subconsciousness. the consciousness controls all our voluntary actions like walking, talking, etc, while our subconsciousness controls our involuntary actions, not only like a response to temperature but also things like what we dream of! so, when we receive an idea it gets stored in the brain, if we give it much importance and constantly think about it our subconscious gets to know about it and makes it a 'special arrangement' so that forgetting it would be the last thing we do in our life. so, now even though we are constantly thinking about forgetting the idea, we are still thinking about the idea which sends the signal to the subconsciousness to make the 'special arrangement' mentioned earlier. 

Let's simplify this with an example, I say, "Don't Think About ELEPHANTS."

Here, I'm 100% sure that those ones of you who know what an elephant looks like would have thought of elephants even though I commanded you not to do so.

 Now, I hope that I would have embedded an idea on how the idea works in your brain and looks like your subconsciousness has made it a 'special arrangement'
to not forget it!