Josh Karthikeyan Week 13 - Memories Bring Back
One thing I always wondered about is how are memories stored? What biological purpose exists for us to store information and why do we feel a sense of nostalgia when revisiting memories? What makes us care about certain moments over others where we store in our brain and deem it as memory? Today, I set out to find the answer to these forever lasting questions that I had but never answered.
According to Dr. Marshall, memories form our “internal biographies” enabling us to remember our relationships and past experiences. She continues with explaining how the memory is split up into its core senses, (sight, smell, sound) which become “distributed to different areas of the brain.” To retrieve memories, we utilize part of the brain, known as the frontal lobes, used for “attention and focus.”
Emotions also directly affect our memories. Steimer describes a research study by “Psychology PhD student Jadyn Park” who found out that “emotional arousal enhances memory encoding” through the “strengthening cohesion across brain networks.” With emotionally charged moments, the numerous parts of our brains “are more integrated” and related to each other. Park notes how if we can disrupt this integration, it may help “weaken traumatic memories.”
These findings help demonstrate why some memories feel stronger than others. When we feel emotions, we create stronger connections between different parts of the brain, leaving long lasting memories that make it easier to remember and harder to forget. It also may be able to explain why nostalgia can trigger for such a small reason like a single smell. This is because the single smell starts up the neuron network throughout our brain and we remember the past memory vividly.
Overall, to be in control of your memories, one has to be in control of their emotions. The brain is an incredibly powerful system that we are still working to comprehend. By learning more about the brain, we are able to understand what makes our experiences so meaningful.
The reference to the popular song Memories reminded me that some people that listen to specific music on vacations to be able to better remember them as they listen to the music: I tried this and it works surprisingly well, because you start associating the music with the memories of that vacation (or any short period of time for that matter), a phenomenon that seems to be quite similar to your contention that nostalgia can “trigger…for a single smell.” I also think the comparison of memories to internal biographies is extremely accurate: like a biography, our memories are subjective and our recollections of a certain event might be drastically different from those of another person who witnessed the exact same objective thing overall. I love that your blogs are consistently a reflection of the scientific method, Josh: you usually start with some kind of hypothesis/question, and use credible evidence and studies to synthesize ideas and credible evidence related to said hypothesis. In your writing, I like your use of rhetorical questions to give a brief introduction to your blog and to draw the reader in, and your use of credible evidence to support your arguments, which I think you could even further improve by listing relevant experience for all of your authors instead of just some, but even without it, you put many sources in conversation which creates a direct appeal to credibility. Thank you for a fantastic piece!
ReplyDelete