Why does the brain mostly remember tragic, bad or embarassing memories instead of the happy ones
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I would lean towards it being an effect of evolution. We are okay with happy situations. Maybe in negative situations our brain remembers them because we have things to learn from them. “You can take the brain out of a monkey, but you can’t take the monkey out of the brain”
OMG. This explains so much!! I thought I was just messed in the head … Well, maybe I am, but at least I have a new point of view to consider! 😁
I agree with what people are talking about.
But there’s also a question of which memories you access at a particular moment.
If you’re in a stressful or negative moment, you may find negative memories easier to recall, or even recalled without you wanting to.
If you’re running from a lion, remembering that time you laid in the daisies all afternoon is not going to help you. Remembering that time you successfully evaded a lion might. Negative memory fixation is a stress response. And since our stresses today tend to be more abstract and less immediately solvable, that stress response triggering negative memories can misfire and linger. Especially if you’re dealing with something like chronic depression or axiety.
It’s called the negative bias. Our brains seek out and remember particularly strong emotions. Mostly the negative ones – disgust, terror, shame, and so on. They register so strongly because in evolutionary terms, that kept you alive. One, in triggering the fight-flight-freeze reflex in the survival situation. And two, in ensuring you would stay away from whatever caused that – someone attacked you from a neighbouring tribe, a predator, you ate something poisonous, you did something horrible and it threatened your standing within the tribe.
The ratio in research is about 3:1* in terms of how much it weighs on you. In other words, for a parent, it’s a good rule of thumb to have three positive experiences with your kid for every 1 negative one. As a teacher or a coach, you have to create three positive experiences for your player or student before you’ve earned a criticism. The flip-side is that too many positives and you get toxic positivity, somewhere around 11:1, like it’s too much positivity and it doesn’t feel authentic anymore.
**As a note, the exact numbers have been debunked (the ones given by the original researchers), so use the ratios with a LOT of leeway depending on the person and the situation. I use this for ELI5 purposes.*
There’s some theories that this is an evolutionary trait. You know what happened to the guy who forgot that wolves ate his buddy? He got eaten by wolves. Humans have a negativity bias in order to stay alive
Huh? This isn’t true at all
The brain has one job. To keep you alive. It isn’t your friend. It will do anything to try and keep you safe. It’s a worry machine.
It is safer for you to worry about how you talked to Phil last week because thousands of years ago if Phil didn’t like you, you may be kicked out of the group and humans living alone are much less safe.
If you cut yourself, you need to remember how not to do it again.
Everyone is wired a little different, but I think it’s important to note that brains remember things by repeating them for one reason or another and if you’re only repeatedly thinking about the bad things, it could mean you’re dealing with anxiety and depression. If you feel like all you remember are negative memories, I’d suggest talking about it with a professional and seeing if you can’t work on solidifying those positive memories. This has nothing to do with evolutionary survival. Good memories are important for that too.
The brain remembers simply as a means to help you presently and in the future.
If you have more negative memories present then the negative ones may not have been properly framed yet.
It’s your brain saying “there’s a problem here. And I’m not quite certain what it was and how it’s solved. You need to deal with this so I can make sure we’re prepared for something similar and we can avoid catastrophe.”
Until your subconscious is settled on what happened, what it means, and what you’re going to do moving forward it won’t relax.
Because it’s job isn’t to brush things aside so you live in a state of dopamine intoxication.
It’s job is to make sure that you don’t become your friend that wandered from the campfire at night and got eaten by a lion or tiger. If it just could brush those things aside, odds are good you too would get eaten by wandering from the campfire.
If you don’t remember the happy ones currently it just means it’s not at the front of your mind. You probably have a few friends that wandered too far in your psychological history.
Deal with the negative stuff properly and you’ll have a better chance of remembering happy things at times of inaction.
The happy ones don’t keep you from dying. They are pleasurable and nice, but your brain probably doesn’t allocate as much resource because well… you almost died that time you rolled your car whilst scrolling cat memes on the highway, and your brain doesn’t want you to go out like that
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