How is data stored in the brain, and why is it difficult to forget traumatic memories?
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Basically, the brain categorizes memories in your sleep into long term memory, which is stored, or short term memory which is to soon be forgotten. The brain categorizes thus based on what it thinks is important, and since traumatic experiences are an example of us surviving a traumatic experience (let’s say a near death experience), the brain stores it in long term memory in hopes that knowledge can help improve your overall survival when you face a similar traumatic experience.
Memory is poorly understood, but one key element is the encoding of relationships, to remember “ate lunch at McDonald’s”, a relationship between your ideas for “you”, “mid-day meal”, “McDonald’s”, and “happened on tuesday”. If this relationship is reinforced consistently, it becomes a habit, a better remembered idea. If it’s just the noise of daily life, this reinforcement doesn’t happen and it’s soon forgotten.
Tramatic memories are important, frequently revisited, and lovel things that don’t happen often. This tends to make them memorablee but also hurts their reliability because you start to remember your recollections rather than the actual event.
Memory is something we’re still learning about, but basically it seems to be stored in network form. Activation of a memory is a series of neurons firing and activating each other. While the hippocampus is a specific area very important in forming memories, storage is all over the brain.
For trauma memories, let’s get cognitive-behavioral. Ordinary forgetting happens passively over time as memories are not accessed and lack relevance. Trauma-related memories are often stored somewhat incoherently, and cause intense distress when recalled. The brain is both trying to figure out the puzzle and recoiling when it finds any puzzle pieces. Unfortunately, this often leads to furious attempts to avoid recalling the memory, which are about as effective as trying not to think about a polar bear (you already did.) This vicious cycle prolongs the memory and intensifies its effect.
Trauma-focused psychotherapy does the opposite. By recalling memories in detail, we force the brain to confront memories, tolerate them, and reprocess them in a more coherent way. By removing the avoidance part of the cycle, it allows for forgetting to take place.
How then is it possible to have pre-encoded memories and programming… As cats having snake phobia from birth even if they haven’t seen one ever?
maybe memories are encoded in DNA? Or Rna?
INATherapist. But, from everything I have read on the subject, the incoherent “saving” of these memories, related to PTSD from soldiers, is why “Psilocybin therapy” has become so relevant and should be made legal. Basically, the “Psilocybin therapy” allows the traumant individual to relive the memories and the brain to process the memories and re-save/overwrite them into a much better state. Amazing read if you have some time to dive down a rabbit hole.
Edit: typo corrected
It is an evolutionary benefit to have trauma be unforgettable. there’s 2 animals who get almost killed by something… one starts thinking “it wasn’t that bad” while the other one has nightmares about it. Who’s more likely to repeat the mistake?
I was wrestling with a friend in high school, and we both fell on my arm, and snapped it literally in half. Went into shock. Would be an amputee except for a really great bone surgeon name Turnbough. Got a metal plate and 6 screws… I still almost have a full fledged panic attack thinking about it 24 years later. I have trouble watching football, because everytime there’s a pile up, I can’t think about anything else besides “somebody’s limbs just snapped off!” I haven’t wrestled or play-fought with an adult since. I don’t put that arm under my wife’s pillow at night.
I WILL NEVER DO THAT AGAIN
We have two memory banks, long term and short term memory, what memory bank a memory goes into depends on how many times we recall that memory, this makes the memory stronger or weaker, think of it like training a muscle.
Often times traumatic, emotional or even sensory triggers can force a memory to repeat meaning it has a stronger bond and will go into long term memory.
Where as in contrast, you probably wont think of something like a license plate of a car which you walked past 15 years ago many times meaning it will fall into short term memory and eventually die off over time.
Ontop of this the mind often warps memories to the point where they differ from the actual events, either seeming more intense/extreme or just different overall i.e paraphrasing of events or slightly different events.
Memory is pretty complicated though, I haven’t thought about it in some time and what I am putting here is from memory from when I was younger so I may be wrong ( feel free to correct me anyone), but I believe that is how memory works put simply.
Highly recommend reading *The Body Keeps the Score* if you want a deep-dive on this addressed to laypeople.
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