I have been told I should write a book about my life. It has had its share of ups and downs, emotional highlights and extreme tragedies. The “exceptional events” that have occurred throughout my life are permanently etched into my memory. They are emotionally associated with those particular moments of time. Most of these memories are super charged with emotion, highly vivid and are; unfortunately, easily recalled. One particular super charged emotional memory and heart stopping moment in my life, was when my best friend was murdered in front of me. I can recall almost every detail, from the temperature outside, the smell that filled the air, how many cars were in the parking lot, how they were parked, what color, make and model they were, how many people were there, what they wore and what their faces, clothes and hair looked like etc. Whenever I retrieve this memory, all of the emotions associated with it return. It feels as if I can’t breathe, my heart literally aches, tears rush down my face; a piece of me has been taken and will never return. I tried to disconnect myself from this horrible tragedy; I went to counseling in hopes of easing the pain, emotions and memory, I was medicated and self-medicating, nothing worked. I could not “forget” or “let it go” no matter how hard I tried. I now understand why this negative emotionally charged memory will not fade.
The brain region most strongly implicated in emotional memory is the amygdala. The amygdala is critically involved in calculating the emotional significance of events, and, through its connection to brain regions dealing with sensory experiences, also appears to be responsible for the influence of emotion on perception – alerting us to notice emotionally significant events. The amygdala appears to be particularly keyed to negative experiences. (Anderson, A.K., Phelps, E.A. 2001.) This memory gets encoded (filed) in my hippocampus and is stored in my LTM. When this memory gets pulled from my LTM, either by a trigger or cue, the emotional attachments to it return and my mood changes; automatically, to the state I was in when this memory occurred.
On a more evolutionary note, according to Elizabeth A. Kensinger from Boston College; she states that although emotional memories are susceptible to distortion, negative emotion conveys focal benefits on memory for detail. These benefits make sense within an evolutionary framework because a primary function of emotion is to guide action and to plan for similar future occurrences, it is logical that attention would be focused on potentially threatening information and that memory mechanisms would ensure that details predictive of an event’s affective relevance would be encoded precisely. So much of what we remember are events infused with emotional relevance, clarifying the nature of emotion’s modulation of memory should provide us with knowledge about how (and how accurately) we retain memories of those events that define our past. (Kensinger, Elizabeth A., Boston College.)
In summary, emotionally charged memories are persistent and resilient to forgetting. There’s reason for this. Evolutionary it makes sense to remember dangerous situations and avoid them for survival. When we face emotionally (physically) arousing situations, stress-hormones are released. These hormones enhance memory. (Schacter, Daniel L., 1996) Unfortunately, we can’t select the memories we want to forget. We can only adapt and move forward.
References
Anderson, A.K., Phelps, E.A. 2001. Lesions of the human amygdala impair enhanced perception of emotionally salient events. Nature, 411, 305-309.
Kensinger, Elizabeth A., Boston College. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE, Negative Emotion Enhances Memory Accuracy Behavioral and Neuroimaging Evidence. https://www2.bc.edu/elizabeth-kensinger/Kensinger_CD07.pdf
Schacter, Daniel L. “Searching for memory: the brain, the mind, and the past”, (New York, 1996). https://www.evl.uic.edu/sugimoto/memEmot.html