Why most people remember bad memories better than good memories
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From the point of view of the peripheral (aka outside of brain or spine) nervous system, traumatic events elicit stronger responses than “good” events. For example, burning your finger while cooking will produce crazy levels of activation in certain areas of the brain that are involved in fear conditioning and episodic memory, for example the the basolateral amygdala and hippocampus. However, a “nice” event, like tasting something delicious does not elicit (by far) the same response. On top of that, these use different pathways in the brain. In general, episodic memory (remembering a sequence of events/actions) is hippocampus-dependent, but the other structures that participate in memory formation depend on the particularities of the memory being imprinted in the brain.
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