Why does the brain mostly remember tragic, bad or embarassing memories instead of the happy ones
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What use are good memories in a survival situation?
Yes to all the negativity bias things others have mentioned and evolutionary theory that attempt to explain that bias.
I also want to point out that people tend to remember things they have recalled more often. If you want your happy memories to stick with you, reflect on them often, write them down, and share them with others. This literally allows your brain to strengthen the natural pathway, and you will be less likely to forget that memory.
Strong emotions are linked to more recallable memories. This does work for positive memories too; people are unlikely to forget the birth of their first child, for example. However, negative emotions tend to be stronger (have more energy), especially in an untrained mind. Building the skill of equanimity lowers this effect.
I’m not seeing this in the comments, so I’ll add this:
Adrenaline, the chemical your body makes when under stress (and causes most of the things we call stress), temporarily makes your brain focus more on memorizing things.
As a side effect, your ability to memorize things WITHOUT adrenaline gets a tiiiiiny bit worse each time you make a dose. For a person with a plain life and an “average brain” (if such a thing exists) the side-effect will be something you can easily adapt to. If you spend most of your childhood heavily stressed or have a brain naturally wired to feel a little stressed, however, it can easily become a self-feeding cycle of bad.
So you are not only wired to memorize stressful things, but your ability to memorize things that aren’t stressful will get worse the longer you are stressed. Since happiness tends to not be stressful, it gets forgotten.
If you’re also having trouble being ruled by your negative thoughts like I do you could try this. Try sitting down and planning out exactly how you want your future to look in about 5 years. Finances, love life, career anything you deem important to you. Get super specific and detail oriented with your answer. Instead of trying to base what you’re currently going through on your past experiences, you can start to build backward from your ideal future instead. Keep thinking if what you’re currently doing is facilitating that future idea of how you want your life to be. If it’s not, don’t dwell on it but correct that behavior. All the best!
Ancient Proverb:
The tree remembers what the axe forgets.
For the axe, this was a normal day and recalling said day will provide little benefit.
For the tree, this day changed their life. Life as they knew it is over. The tree will recall that axe vividly.
In order to avoid mistakes with dire consequences our brains are wired to recall traumatic events in stark detail. Only upon looking back at such events do we see clearly how to avoid them in the future.
A smell or taste may remind us of that single bout of food poisoning. A visual or auditory cue may alert us to danger before our conscious minds pick it out.
Embarrassment is similar. Such things may not kill us or make us sick, but embarrassment can prevent social interaction from occurring. Humans are, at our core, social beings.
More of a 5yo answer:
If something good happens, great, there’s nothing to improve on you enjoy it and move on.
If something bad happens, your mind tries to figure out “how could I have changed the outcome?, How could it have gone better/different?, etc”. It’s harder to move on, cause it’s almost like it’s forever unfinished.
Its a self defense mechanism, for the brain to learn from past mistakes and not repeat them.
Because that is the stuff it needed to remember to stay alive. Really bad stuff (including loss of social support like in embarrassment) could have been a death sentence for us further down our evolutionary tree.
You remember the stuff that can kill you so you are VERY motivated to avoid it.
While both experiences are temporary, pain leads to death, pleasure doesn’t.
Resource allocation.
Pain is a more valuable memory to staying alive than pleasure.
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