The BBC documentaries have collected in their film the most curious and significant medical and psychological experiments of recent years, explaining the properties of our memory.
Their conclusion is unequivocal: our memory is not a treasury of events and phenomena, but a perfect mechanism that controls our emotions, awareness of our own “I”, thanks to it we plan the future and analyze the past. Many of the experiments are amazing. For example, scientists artificially reduce the strength of emotions and change the attitude of the subjects to the experience. It turns out that our memories are not a simple reproduction of information. This is an active reconstruction, an attempt to relive what once caused our emotions. The old data is overwritten, as it were: the molecular processes that occurred during the initial memorization are reactivated in the brain. Scientists have learned how to correct them with drugs, which can help in the psychotherapy of those who have experienced a natural disaster or sexual abuse. However, the moral question remains open: by erasing the painful, one can also erase the valuable that keeps our experience.
1 DVD, BBC, UNION Video