The Psychology of Sinking: Why Forgetting Is a Feature

Most productivity tools fight forgetting. Reminders, notifications, pinned items, starred messages—the assumption is that forgetting is the enemy. If something slips your mind, the system failed.

Gravity takes the opposite position: forgetting is the mechanism, not the failure mode.

Notes sink over time. If you don't rescue them, they drift toward the bottom and eventually out of sight. This sounds like a bug. It's not. It's the core of how the system works.

By the end of this post, you'll understand:

• Why your brain needs to forget most of what it encounters
• How repeated review acts as an attention filter
• Why the notes that sink are supposed to sink

The forgetting problem (that isn't one)

Here's a number that might surprise you: you forget approximately 70% of new information within 24 hours. This is called the forgetting curve, and it's been replicated in studies since Ebbinghaus first measured it in 1885.

The instinct is to treat this as a problem to solve. Enter flashcard apps, spaced repetition systems, and increasingly aggressive notification schemes. If we forget, the answer must be more reminders.

But here's the thing: forgetting isn't a malfunction. It's a feature of a system that works.

Your brain processes an enormous amount of information every day—estimates range from 11 million bits per second hitting your sensory systems, of which about 50 bits per second make it to conscious awareness. If you remembered all of it with equal weight, you'd be paralyzed. The signal would drown in noise.

Forgetting is how your brain separates signal from noise. Things that aren't reinforced fade. Things that matter—because you encounter them repeatedly, or because they connect to strong emotions, or because you actively retrieve them—stick.

The sinking mechanic in Gravity mirrors this. It doesn't fight your brain's natural filtering. It works with it.

What happens when you review

Let's walk through what actually happens during a Gravity review session.

You scroll through your stream. Notes pass by. Most of them, you skim and keep scrolling. They don't grab you. They were relevant when you captured them, but now? They're just... there.

Then something catches your eye. An idea you'd forgotten about. A todo that suddenly feels urgent. A quote that lands differently than it did last week. You swipe right, and it jumps to the top.

Here's what just happened, cognitively:

The notes you skipped received no reinforcement. In memory terms, the neural pathways associated with those thoughts got slightly weaker. This is how forgetting works at the biological level—unused connections fade.

The note you rescued got reinforced. You noticed it, recognized its value, and took action. The neural pathway strengthened. The thought became more available for future retrieval.

You didn't decide upfront what was important. You let your attention decide in the moment, during review. The rescue mechanic turns your attention into a sorting algorithm.

Hold up—what if I forget something actually important?

This is the anxiety at the heart of most note-taking systems: what if I lose something I'll need later?

Let's examine what "important" actually means here.

If something is genuinely important, one of two things will happen:

1. External triggers will remind you. A deadline approaches. Someone mentions the topic. You encounter related information. The note becomes relevant again, and you'll think of it or search for it.

2. Internal salience will rescue it. During review, your attention will snag on it. The idea will feel alive. You'll bump it back to the top.

If neither of these happens—if nothing external triggers the memory, and your own attention never lands on it during review—ask yourself: was it actually important?

Importance isn't a fixed property. It's contextual. An idea that felt crucial in March might be irrelevant by June—not because you forgot it, but because circumstances changed. The "important thing you forgot" was often just important at the time, and time has moved on.

The notes that sink without being rescued aren't failures of the system. They're the system working correctly.

The Zeigarnik effect (inverted)

In 1927, psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik noticed something odd: waiters could remember complex orders while they were open, but forgot them completely once the bill was paid. Unfinished tasks stick in memory; completed ones vanish.

This became known as the Zeigarnik effect, and it has an important implication for note-taking.

When you capture a thought—write it down, get it out of your head—you close the loop. The thought is no longer "unfinished." Your brain can let go of it, trusting that it exists somewhere persistent.

This is the relief that Karpathy describes: "When I note something down, I feel that I can immediately move on, wipe my working memory, and focus fully on something else."

But here's where it gets interesting. If the thought is truly unfinished—if there's still something to do, still something to think about—it won't stay quiet. It'll nag at you during review. You'll see the note and feel the pull of incompletion.

The notes that sink peacefully? They were finished. The loop was closed. You can let them go.

The notes that keep demanding rescue? They're not done with you yet.

Attention as the ultimate filter

There's a deeper principle here: your attention is the best curator you have.

Algorithmic systems try to guess what's important to you based on signals like recency, engagement, or explicit priorities. But they're working with imperfect proxies. They don't know what's actually on your mind right now.

You do. Not consciously, necessarily—but your attention knows.

When you scroll through your stream and something catches your eye, that's not random. Something about that note, in this moment, connected with something you're thinking about, working on, or curious about. The resonance is real, even if you can't articulate why.

Gravity turns that resonance into a sorting mechanism. Things that resonate get rescued. Things that don't, sink. Over time, the top of your stream becomes a curated set of what's alive for you right now.

No algorithm. No tagging. No explicit organization. Just attention, applied repeatedly.

Why this compounds

The longer you use this system, the more it calibrates to you.

The notes that survive repeated review are genuinely durable—ideas you keep coming back to, todos that matter across contexts, references that stay relevant. They've been tested by your own attention and passed.

The notes that sink are calibrated too. You've learned, implicitly, what matters to you and what doesn't. The sinking isn't loss; it's signal. It's your past self telling your present self: "This didn't stick."

Over months and years, you develop a felt sense for what deserves capture and what doesn't. You start filtering earlier, before you even write the note. Not because you've built a system—but because you've trained your intuition through thousands of micro-decisions about what to rescue.

The counterintuitive conclusion

Most tools for thought try to help you remember everything. Gravity helps you forget most things—gracefully.

The sinking mechanic isn't a limitation. It's the core value proposition. It's what makes the stream manageable, what keeps your attention focused on what's alive, and what lets you trust that losing a note is usually the right outcome.

Forgetting isn't the enemy. It's the filter.

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Let your thoughts sink. The ones that matter will float back up.