For example if I ask someone what they had for breakfast or what song was on the radio yesterday, they may not know.
But if I asked them what they did the day their loved one died 30 years ago, they could probably tell you: I had Cheerios for breakfast. The mail was late. I got stuck in traffic. Boyz II Men was on the radio.
Why does our brain store these tiny details in times of trauma?
In: 7
It is likely an evolutionary survival trait.
Traumatic events burn details into memory so that you are able to remember specifics if you ever find yourself in that situation again. 50,000 years ago, this was a huge benefit – you want to remember the sights, sounds, smells, etc. that were happening before you were attacked by a tiger or a landslide happened. Remembering and recognizing those little details might save your life if it happens again.
I do believe dangerous Ir traumatic situations are etched into our memory so that we learn to avoid them in the future
That is why you have so many cringe memories from childhood too, is wager, so you learn to avoid them
They found that adrenaline triggers a better memory storage. It’s to you remember that event so you avoid it in the future. Of course, we now do stuff to get scared on purpose.
Pain, fear and sadness all trigger adrenal responses.
Trauma elicits a large effect time after time. Distressing emotions trigger “flight or fight” and this is something that has withstood years of evolution.
Happiness and good emotions release a little bit of dopamine, but this kind of reinforcement isn’t as strong as the traumatic negative reinforcement when it comes to solidifying memories.
Trauma is something that could kill you so your brain does everything possible to make you remember exactly what it felt like so that it doesn’t happen to you again and actually kill you. Traumatic emotions follow in this same pathway.
We don’t actually. There’s been good research that we don’t actually remember the details better for traumatic events than we do for ordinary ones. But what we DO do is “tell” ourselves the story of the traumatic event over and over and over, and the story becomes the memory. Over time the details of the story can drift, just like anything else. People will recall very specific details that didn’t happen, or didn’t happen that way, and be extremely confident that their memory is accurate.
([Here’s an article](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/media-spotlight/201503/remembering-911) about the affect, where they followed up with thousands of people directly after, 1 year, 5 years and 10 years after the 9-11 Attacks.)
When you go through any event certain connections are activated in your brain. When this is a good or bad (traumatic) event, we release chemicals that “tag” this connection to tell your brain that it’s an important memory.
Later that night when you go to sleep, your brain finds these tagged connections and consolidates them in your memory. It’s theorised that trauma is replayed in our minds as we dream, and the brain looks for similar memories that it can relate the trauma to, which allows your brain to better understand what you’re going through, and slowly lessens the trauma over time.
So, like overnight therapy, your trauma is revisited without emotion, then connected to relative experiences, which tells your brain that although the trauma you felt is bad, you’ve gone through similar events, and you’ll get through this…
Or something like that =P
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