“When you forgive someone for a wrongdoing, you don’t forget the event. But once you forgive, the memory doesn’t hurt as much.”

Felipe De Brigard, a neuroscientist and philosopher, is studying how forgiveness and memory affect one another, through the experiences of people who survived political violence in Colombia. The decades of conflict included bombings, massacres, kidnap for ransom, extortion, force displacement, assassinations, etc. Through his work, De Brigard hopes to learn how memory affects forgiveness, and how memories are affected by different ways to approach the act of forgiving. He is also tackling a question many Colombian survivors are grappling with now, and which has dogged humanity since forever: “How do you help the person who cannot bring herself to forgive, and yet wants to move on?