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!
ReplyDeleteHi Josh! I always love how you take a STEM approach to your blogs. I thought that the structure of your blog was well done as it allowed me to easily follow along to how memories work as it got more and more complex the more I read. Especially with the questions at the beginning of your blog that allowed me to quickly know the order of topics you covered. Fun fact, I just finished learning about memory in AP psychology so it was really fun to read your blog and remember (hahaha) everything that I had learned. I found it fascinating that our emotions have such a big impact on the memories we recall and even store and that even as our memory starts to deteriorate, due to age or other things only the memories stored with strong emotional connections are easily recalled. However, memories with strong emotions can be a double edged sword. Yes, like you stated in your blog, strong emotions can enhance memory encoding, but it can also blur the details of the memory making it that every time you recall it the memory changes slightly.
ReplyDeleteThank you for talking about nostalgia, Josh, because it’s a feeling that I don’t think is nearly explored in enough detail in any field, be it STEM or the arts. Nostalgia is such a beautifully bittersweet feeling, because it gives you the pleasure and happiness that you experienced from a previous memory while denying you the ability to go back to the way things once were. It’s humanity’s way of keeping the past alive when it has already been buried by time. This desire to retain memories is implicitly emotional, which is why I’m really glad you talked about the impact of emotional arousal on the way we perceive our memories. Humans are capable of completely erasing memories they don’t care for from their heads—although memories they keep need not always be happy ones. Humans are attached to their memories when those memories carry great emotional weight to them—for example, a humiliating moment may bring you great shame and embarrassment. These strong, infiltrating emotions allow that moment to remain ingrained in your memory, despite all your best efforts to forget about it. The same can be said for a happy memory, too—that is what makes our minds so powerful. Something as simple as our feelings can dictate how we view our past, and therefore how we view ourselves in the present.
ReplyDeleteExhausted by the demands of high school, I often forget to make time for myself to be curious, a trait which I only appreciated fully as a young child. Thank you for continuing to feed your own curiosity through google searches and sharing your findings with us through informative blogs. You’re an inspiration!
ReplyDeleteThe Harvard article you linked in your blog was quite informative, thank you for sharing! It’s so crazy to think that humans only discovered the actor behind memory consolidation in 1953. Science has advanced a lot in the following decades, but this just goes to show that there is a lot more to discover about the human brain.
Like Atharv, I also have a lot of memories stored in random songs I’ve heard throughout my life. Whenever I hear “Clumsy” by Fergie on 96.5 KOIT, I’m reminded of a girl from my ballet class in 3rd grade because Fergie had been playing in my car on the way home from class. Other senses also have the power to retrieve memories as well. Do you take AP Psychology? One of my psych friends told me that smell evokes stronger memories compared to other senses because it bypasses the thalamus (which processes other senses) and goes straight to the amygdala and hippocampus, where memories/emotions are recalled. After reading Jaycee’s comment, I’m glad to know that someone else was also reminded of this lol.