November 28, Emotions and memory

It is also interesting to me that Bourtchouladze addressed the issue of fear within a community, and how it affects the individuals involved. A friend of mine is from an area of New York that’s been deemed bad and gang-filled. She gets embarrassed when she admits that she’s from a place that’s often horribly portrayed in movies. But she swears that it’s “not all like that”. And often defends her neighborhood. So it’s interesting to read about the opposite effect, or another one, in which the community also believes in these ideas and images conveyed to them. Once fear is placed in a community, it grows.

I was also interested in Bourtchouladze’s talk of emotional memory. Not particularly in relation to the amygdala, but in the events that cause a strong emotional state, thereby becoming engrained in our memory. I’m finding this relatable to the dance world specifically when we are audience members. As a freshman in the dance department, one of the biggest things they teach us is how to talk about dance, how to verbalize a kinesthetic experience, or how to speak to the emotions brought up by this experience as well. How do we react as an audience member as well as a performer? Thinking back to the many dance reviews we were forced to read and analyze, the most vivid descriptions were those that caused a strong emotional reaction. This is true as an audience member as well as a dancer onstage and off. As an audience member, we remember what we connect with; a certain part of the dance, an expression, and a movement we were drawn to. As a dancer, we remember the combinations we like, the ones that make us happy, and the ones we can attach an emotion or story to. In this sense, I think Bourtchouladze is right, the stronger the emotional reaction, the more likely we are to remember. The more we read about emotions and memory, the more relevant the connection between the two become.

Emotionality and Identity

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.

Emotional States and Memory

Although it is only briefly mentioned in Bourtcholadze, I found the connection of emotional states to memory to be extremely intriguing and wished that it would have been discussed more in depth. On page 92 she briefly discusses an experiment in manic-depressive patients where the quantity of memory recalled is directly linked to a change in emotional state. I found it interesting that the patients who experienced the most major mood swings were able to recall the least. I do understand the rareness that such a violent swing will occur during the time allowed for the experiment, but I find that the simple idea of mood-dependent retrieval important when discussing mental disorders and wish that Bourtcholadze had taken more time to concentrate on this idea, instead of giving me just a paragraph. She does continue on to discuss how post-traumatic stress disorder effects recall of certain events, but I find a distinct separation between these two topics.

As others have mentioned before in previous readings, I too find the idea of synaesthesia incredibly fascinating. However, I found it strange that Bourtcholadze generalized in saying that synaestheics have difficulty in math when I think of my two friends who are synaestheics, who actually have more trouble with literature based work than something as concrete as math. These might be rare cases, but I’m wondering if Bourtcholadze over generalized in her statement. I think I take issue with this because she does not back up her brief statement with any real studies, so I find room to question. (pg. 109) She does make a logical conclusion to assume that synaestheics would have more ease with artistic expression than math, but where is her proof?

At the end of chapter 5, Bourtcholadze finally addresses an issue I've had with the study of both amnesiacs and people with extraordinary memory, proposing that understanding how these anomalies arise will help in greater understanding of how memory works and the different pathways it might take. I feel that in the studies of amnesiacs, the researchers often lose sight of the big picture, at least when they write up their findings. I found it refreshing to have these ideas stated outright instead of just implied.

November 28 Blog

Eric Kandel does an excellent job of detailing the development of the science of neurobiology in his book In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind while simultaneously giving an account of his own maturation as a scientist, especially concerning his interest in the science of memory. I was particularly impressed with the earliest steps that were taken to gain an understanding of neural science and was astonished as I read that these scientists were able to hypothesize such complex and detailed mechanisms of nerves, synapses, and impulses with such a limited foundation of knowledge. Though some of the conclusions seemed somewhat logical, such as Cajal’s interpretation of the shape of nerve cells by studying infant animals and using a staining method, other conclusion seemed to be more coincidental. For example, it states further that Cajal inferred that neurons interact through a synapse, in which the axon of one neuron communicates with the dendrites of another. Because it was not detailed in the book, I wonder how Cajal was able to determine this; considering that microscopy was not as well developed, I am curious as to which scientific methods, if any, he used, or if it was merely a “leap of imagination” as Kandel stated on the prior page.

I was also particularly interested in Bourtchouladze’s discussion of the amygdala being involved in emotionally related and emotionally explicit memory. On page 85, he describes a study in which patients with no brain damage, brain damage to the amygdala, brain damage to the hippocampus, and brain damage to both we analyzed in terms of recall and emotional conditioning. Patients with hippocampus damage had no recall but showed normal emotional conditioning, patients with amygdala damage showed accurate recall but no emotional conditioning, and patients with damage to both showed neither. Bourtchouladze comments on the importance of this finding, stating that the results “clearly demonstrate that the amygdala is indispensable for fear condition” and that “they illustrate the double dissociation between emotional and declarative aspects of memory.” While reading this, I thought about reading we had done in previous weeks concerning emotional memories and their higher recall, as compared with non-emotional memories, and I couldn’t help but assume that the amygdala is the key to this. I was also intrigued by the idea of emotional conditioning, which was discussed both in this book and in Kandel’s book, and wondered how a conditioned stimulus is represented within the brain in comparison with an unconditioned stimulus.

After such learning occurs, some sort of memory consolidation must occur to transform it into long-term memory. In Kandel’s discussion of the biological basis of the process, which supported the idea that the transformations necessary for learning and memory occur in the synapses rather than in the variety of cell, he discusses the idea of the number of synaptic terminals and active synapses changes. Specifically, he states that long-term sensitization results in a doubling in the number of synaptic terminals and an increase from 40% to 60% of active synapses, and when the memory fades, the numbers drop again. While this concept makes sense in terms of the words sensitization and habituation, I wondered what role the pruning of neurons and synapses played in the equation.

Habituation and Post Traumatic Memory Alterations

In the book, In Search Of Memory, Kandel discusses methods of Habituation, Sensitization, and Conditioning (pg 167). Habituation is when a subject is exposed to a stimulus so repeatedly and consistently that the subject grows accustomed to the stimulus and eventually begins to ignore it. This is something that we do many times throughout our lives. An example of how habituation to stimuli in our environment that might otherwise seem threatening can be seen through a wild animal’s reaction to a car opposed to a dog’s reaction to a car. Kandel writes about habituation that it “eliminates inappropriate or exaggerated defensive responses.” The dog no longer responds defensively to a speeding car, or in a large city, maybe even to a car horn which it encounters countless times a day. To habituation to something means to classify it as mundane and unworthy of notability. We are habituated to every rustle of the leaves that doesn’t seem abnormal. Without habituation we would be constantly unable to distinguish the important from the unimportant stimuli. Our reactions might commonly be inappropriately reactionary. We would live in a constant state of discomfort. Through habituation we achieve a level of stability in our world of expectations.

Though this stability and comfort we have learned to be shocked by what is unpredictable and new. If a situation arises which is extremely shocking and negative our system may be so effected by it that our memories and mindset may be altered as a result. This can be seen with post traumatic stress symptoms, discussed in Bourtchouldaze. She writes that traumatic memories so alter the way our memory records that they are extremely visual and they force other memories to be not recorded, such as route daily events (pg 101). The idea that someone’s memory can not only be amplified for a specific period of time, but that they way they remember is actually altered (made more visual) is really interesting to me. But even after reading about this phenomenon in both Schacter and Bourtchouldaze, I still wonder why exactly this occurs.

Furthermore, with regards to Kandel’s discussion of habituation, I started wondering if it is possible to be fully habituation to something that may otherwise cause symptoms of post traumatic stress. If someone expects a bad situation- if what would normally be classified as a traumatic event is part of someone’s world of expectations- then wouldn’t it seem that they shouldn’t exhibit post traumatic stress memory alterations? If a dog can become habituated to a car-horn over a period of time, can people be habituated to war or murder or something equally shocking? People seem to make the argument in the affirmative when they talk about desensitization and video games and America’s youth of today. But what about with actual events in people’s lives?