The events that have marked our lives, that have been experienced with high emotional involvementthey are not usually remembered exactly as they were.
Human beings tend to remember them in another way, even dressing up those parts of their life history to make them more positive than they were.
It seems proven that we tend to remember more easily the experiences that are more emotional. Emotion increases our ability to remember.
However, in cases of trauma of a certain severity, our memory tends to obscure the most painful experiences.
Two brain areas that connect emotion and memory
In our limbic system there are two regions that connect the regulation of emotions with the storage of memories.
- Hippocampus: located in the temporal cortex, one of its functions is to facilitate memory. Form, retain and remember. It has been shown that certain pathologies such as Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia damage this brain area quickly.
- Amygdala: is a mass of cells that is also found in the temporal lobe. It is responsible for the management and regulation of emotions, filters memories and stores them, depending on the emotional weight they had for us.
According to certain research, the mixture of emotions with memories has an adaptive role in our environment; memory prepares us for future situations.
A romantic breakup, for example, can be extraordinarily painful when the wound is still tender, but when the time of grieving is overcome and acceptance occurs, the person feels more prepared to face the future.
Memory helps us recognize ourselves in the past, and allows us to better manage certain situations about which we have acquired experience.
Can bad memories become good ones?
Do we deceive ourselves to the point of disguising our own life history? Is it possible to give another meaning to memories that marked our past?
One of the researchers who has worked in this field is Susumu Tonewagaa Japanese scientist, Nobel Prize winner in Medicine and Physiology in 1987, who has delved into the field of neuroscience with special emphasis on the study of enzymes and synaptic receptors that are vital in the formation of memory.
Their study revealed the brain circuit that controls how memories are associated with positive or negative emotions. This circuit could lead to new medications that could help treat certain psychological disorders.
Additionally, his team discovered that it is possible to reverse the emotional association of specific memories by manipulating brain cells with a technique called optogenetics, which uses a beam of light to control neuronal activity. This technique can help discover how the amygdala relates to other parts of the brain so that fear learning occurs.
At the moment, the trials have been carried out only in rodents with positive results, but they are tests for future medical treatments.
In Tonewaga’s own words, “in the future it is possible that methods can be developed that help people remember positive memories more strongly than negative ones.”
In fact, optogenetics is already used for .
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