Bourtchouladze addresses fear conditioning relative to context in a very tangible manner, introducing this concept based on the transformation of violence and retained level of fear in Washington Heights. I found this particularly accessible because a close friend of mine was recently provoked to move from this specific area after being mugged in her own apartment building. She spoke so highly of the neighborhood in prior years, remarking on affordability as well as the generally friendly attitudes of local residents. However, after this violent encounter, her mentality has shifted completely, and it is apparent that a certain and deep level of fear has been established. One can imagine how detrimental this can be to an individual’s everyday activity, not only mentally but physically. It confines her to remaining indoors at night, carrying mace for some reassurance of protection, and refusing to walk with valuable items alone. In other words, it restricts a person to become even more judgmental and cautious because there is heightened sensitivity to the external world. It seems that fear permeates or affects in some manner all levels of the Freudian structural theory, including the id, the ego, and the superego.
When Bourtchouladze discussed the amygdala as a region of the brain associated with emotional functioning and memory, one question was raised (though perhaps a bit naïve but I’ll ask nonetheless): In general, do women have a more highly developed amygdala than men? I realize this is based on the assumption and typical representation of women as sensitive or overly emotional, and men as more passive or indifferent, but I am still curious. I thought state-dependent memory was also a very interesting concept, and it concerns many of the ideas I’m addressing in my conference project examining the emotionality of autobiographical memory in relation to music. “Events that we learn in one emotional state may be remembered better when we revert to the state we were in during the original experience” (91). It made a lot of sense that the “personal significance of a flashbulb event—consequentiality—has a crucial role in the immunity of the memory for the event” (97); it seems that this concept in itself is what makes flashbulb events so vivid and perhaps integral to one’s sense of self. It seems that we psychoanalyze these events to the extent that they become engrained in our minds, and the way that we relay them to people can develop such regularity even though actual knowledge of the event can be perceived as esoteric and perhaps only relatable to a certain degree.
Kandel’s “In Search of Memory” details autobiographical accounts interwoven with historical context, balancing both personal and public memory and highlighting their interconnectedness. He characterized the matter at hand quite succinctly by identifying how neuroscience has tried to reveal the “ultimate mystery: how each person’s brain creates the consciousness of a unique self and the sense of free will” (11). This emphasizes the ongoing struggle to discover the mechanics of individuality—what a person considers specific—while simultaneously explaining personal freedom, something that is considered fundamental to the specific. I thought that Kandel’s inclusion of personal anecdotes made this book comprehensible; he didn’t limit the information presented to a purely academic discussion of psychology. Relocalization and neuroplasticity are truly remarkable phenomena; to think that the brain is so resilient in that neural pathways are capable of compensating for sensory, motor and cognitive functions.
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Nadia's analysis of both authors' takes on habituation and emotional conditioning and sensitizing in memory leaves what I believe to be a good space for me to talk about one (very) particular section of the Kandel reading: On page 206, near the beginning of the chaper "Synapses Change With Experience", he is speaking of how short term memories are transformed by various forms of repetition into long term memories. He brings this idea down to a "reductionist" level, i.e. the changes made simply between two cells (the axons to the dendrites and the intensity of the synaptic responses), but this can just as easily be blown up into the bigger picture which is presented in the Bourtchouladze reading, where psychoanalysis and the consequential "reliving" of certain (especially traumatic) experiences, along with state-dependent memory conditioning, are two very important external and more superficial (that is to say, not on the neurochemical level) factors and activities that cause these very neuronal changes. Returning to page 206 in Kandel, one particular phrase, a cliche at that, struck me: "Practice does make perfect." My reaction to this phrase come pretty much from being a music student, but whenever I hear it, I want to change it to "Practice makes permanent." And I think that that rewording and reconceptualizing better applies here as well. This in fact underlines one of the general themes of our reading for this week. A person who becomes habituated to respond in certain way to a certain stimulus based on conditioning on the premise of personal emotional experiences; for instance, Nadia mentioned her friend who had a very distressing experience in her previous apartment building and thus, plagued by the memory of this experience, has now trained her neurons to respond in a completely altered way when something reminds her of that building or that experience. This conditioning is, albeit inadvertently, "practiced" in the synaptic firings, but, for the sake in speaking in the terms of the cliche, this practice is not making "perfect"; Nadia's friend held a very high opinion of her living space before this happened, and is thus ignoring all of those previous memories because of one instance. In all (very objective) fairness, it probably was a very nice place in which to live; traumatic events such as mugging happen in many places that can otherwise, in most respects, be very nice. So from an objective standpoint, this conditioning that Nadia's friend underwent is not "perfect"; her perspective probably doesn't entirely reflect reality. However, speaking subjectively, the girl who was mugged is not in the wrong whatsoever to now have an intense and probably permanent fear of this place - her personal safety was threatened, and her natural human memory and emotionality is serving to protect her. And this all represents a huge aspect of the phenomenon of overall memory that we are studying - habituation and sensitization are absolutely vital to survival on the global and personal level, but at the same time, from a purely objective standpoint, these processes can cause people to remember things, and subsequently perceive similar things and cues, inaccurately, especially in events rooted in trauma and fear. Fear conditioning and fear's effect on memory are probably the most intriguing phenomenons to me that I have encountered throughout this entire course, and this reading has further perpetuated my interest. Especially in the case of fear, humans are prone, and almost unable to avoid, to conditioning themselves to protective responses and, as both authors touch on more than once, change the overall way that they perceive the world. And especially in the case of fear conditioning, practice makes permanent, not perfect.
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