It seems obvious that the moments of life associated with fear, stress or anger are remembered the most. But this impression is deceptive. Strong emotions create a vivid image in the memory, but cut off the details.
Can we trust our memory? In recent decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have more and more arguments in favor of the unreliability of this tool. Remembrance is inseparable from the emotions associated with the event. On the one hand, emotions help us retain important information. On the other hand, recent research shows that strong emotions act as a filter that turns off the details of what happened, leaving only a vivid image. And the stronger the experience, the lower the reliability of our memories. This conclusion was reached by a team of cognitive psychologists at the University of Waterloo (Canada) led by Myra Fernandes.1.
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The filtering effect is related to the strength and nature of the experiences that a person experiences. Fear, anger, numbness – all these are reactions to events that our body perceives as a threat to life. Survival mode is activated, and resources are redirected only to the most important tasks. “The brain tries to fix the main aspects of the experience, sacrificing the details,” explains Mira Fernandez. – What caused the shock is clearly imprinted in our experience, and the rest does not matter to the brain. From an evolutionary point of view, this is useful. After all, this way of remembering allows the brain to save what can be used as a warning in the future, and thus avoid the repetition of dangerous situations.
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Imaging studies have shown that traumatic experiences cause increased arousal in two small areas of the brain, collectively referred to as the nucleus accumbens (or amygdala). This zone is responsible for assessing the emotional significance of everything that happens to us. When activated, it sets off a chain reaction in the brain that involves other areas. “Activity in the nucleus accumbens affects other organs involved in memory creation,” explains Elizabeth Kensinger, a neurophysiologist at Boston College (USA). – The details of the event as a result can be forgotten and replaced arbitrarily. But the core of the memory, on the contrary, will be more resistant to distortions.
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In general, all our episodic memories are subject to distortions to one degree or another. They are, in essence, only a reconstruction of events, assembled from the building blocks of our memory. The more often we remember something, the more likely it is that the mental image will change from time to time: some “brick” may fall out, another will take its place. This happens all the time, but we ourselves, as a rule, do not notice the substitution. Fernandez draws an analogy with the game of broken phone. “Each time the picture reappears, it is already a little different, although for us it is the same event.” Various factors can affect the likelihood of error. For example, cognitive psychologist Elizabeth Loftus found that verbal “cues” in conversation can affect the nature and structure of memories, creating false memories. For example, a question with the word “catastrophe” forces witnesses to an accident to name a higher speed of cars.
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This does not mean that our memories cannot be relied upon at all, Mira Fernandez emphasizes. In fact, our brain does a great job of coding countless memories every day. But it cannot store information about the smallest details, it would be impractical. Therefore, while we sleep, the brain sorts and edits the information received during the day, trying to make room for new information, similar to how a computer frees up space on a hard drive in order to write more data there. “It is more important for our emotional well-being to understand and preserve the essence than to mechanically fix everything that falls into the focus of our attention,” the researcher explains.
For more details, see University of Waterloo.
1 See uwaterloo.ca for details.