Some events in our life are erased over time, others are not erased from memory, traumatizing the psyche. How can we learn to remember what we should and forget what we don't need? Recently, scientists have come to grips with this issue.
Photos erasing memories
It is believed that people tend to capture the moments of their lives in a photo in order to better remember them. However, Marianne Harry, professor of psychology at Queen Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand, and her colleagues have found that overuse of photography negatively affects our memory. This was shown by a study conducted by scientists.
Marianne Harry originally studied the impact of photographs on our childhood memories. She found out that children remember the details of their birthday celebration worse if everything that happened was filmed on camera. The researchers decided to conduct an experiment with the participation of adults. They invited a group of student volunteers to go to the museum and either photograph or memorize a number of art and historical objects on display.
The next day, experts tested their memory of this excursion. It turned out that the subjects were much worse at recognizing the objects they photographed than those they just looked at. In addition, the students remembered individual details of the exhibits they photographed worse.
It would seem that this phenomenon is a paradox. After all, photographs should take us back to the moment when they were taken and refresh our memory. But in reality it is not so.
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With the advent of digital photography, people were able to take a huge number of pictures. Even if a person does not have a camera with him, he can always use a cell phone camera.
Almost every more or less remarkable event in life - a vacation at a resort, a country walk, a trip to the theater, a family celebration, a public event - is captured in the photo. As a result, hundreds of photographs are obtained, which, due to the fact that there is no longer the need to develop film and print photographs, are downloaded to a computer.
And sometimes they just stay on the phone. The author of the pictures does not even always look at them, putting it off for later. In addition, we are often too lazy to spend time selecting photos, editing them, and so on. In the best case, we skim through them, select two or three successful ones and post them on social networks … But we happily forget about the rest. Over time, more and more such "forgotten" pictures accumulate, and we just physically do not have time to sort out the "rubble".
According to Professor Harry, this trend leads to the fact that people are unable to live in the present.
“People take thousands of photographs, which are then just lying around somewhere, and they are not revised, since it is very difficult to decompose and catalog them,” the researcher says.
Moreover, having a camera or cell phone with us, we do not try to remember this or that object or situation, relying again on the possibilities of photography. It seems to us that later it will be enough to look at the picture to remember the necessary things …
Earlier research has shown that, indeed, looking at old pictures helps us retain important moments in our lives. But this is in the event that we really spend time watching them and return to them later.
Details versus negativity
All sorts of psychological experiences and trauma are the factor that most often ruins our lives. A person who has experienced a serious shock - violence, betrayal, the death or departure of a loved one - who has become the victim of a car accident or terrorist attack, often after that cannot recover for a long time and lead a normal life.
Constant "attachment" to a negative situation can cause depression, isolation, aggression towards others, rejection and distrust of the world as a whole. As a consequence, this leads to the impossibility of successfully implementing, building a career, relationships. The effects can last for years.
Psychologists from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois (USA) have figured out how to get rid of negative memories. To do this, you should recall the accompanying situations details, which can also be of a positive nature. The more such details you remember, the less the emotional effect of the negative will be.
The essence of know-how is to decompose the situation into its individual components. Scientists proceeded from the fact that any negative does not develop in a vacuum, there is always some kind of background - neutral or even positive, like rain or a brightly shining sun, colors, sounds, conversations …
During the experiments, the volunteers were asked to recall and recount in detail the most important positive and negative moments from their biography: for example, having a child - and failing in the college entrance exam … Several weeks later, the subjects were asked to return to the laboratory and return to the same memories. The specialists recorded their brain activity using MRI.
At the same time, some were offered to focus exclusively on the emotions that they experienced at the moment of living the situation, and others - to recall events in an objective context. If the subjects recalled the funeral of a loved one, then in the first case they were asked to concentrate, for example, on their feelings about the loss, and in the second - to remember what they were wearing on the day of the funeral or what they ate at the commemoration. If they suffered because of the separation from their marriage partner, they were asked to either focus on their suffering, or remember which birds were singing outside the window that day.
It was noticed that when the volunteer began to recall "extraneous" details, the activity of the generators of emotions in the brain dropped sharply. In this case, other brain areas responsible for emotional control came into play.
This strategy, from the point of view of American psychologists, looks very promising. Experts believe that it will not only suppress unpleasant memories, but also stimulate positive emotions.
Can the memory be modified?
A group of American scientists is developing a new device that can restore lost memory. This was announced at a conference in Texas by Dr. Justin Sanchez, Special Program Manager of the US Defense Advanced Research and Development Agency.
As a result of trauma, people often lose their declarative memory (responsible for storing and accessing information about the past), which leads to amnesia. The unfortunate do not recognize their relatives and friends, they are not able to remember the facts of their own biography … Sometimes amnesia is complete, that is, the memory remains pure, like an unwritten sheet of paper.
Until recently, there were no radical methods to get rid of traumatic amnesia. Although it has long been assumed that a part of the brain called the hippocampus plays a significant role in the formation of declarative memory. In this regard, two suggestions have been made about how memory can be restored. The first way is to stimulate the said hippocampus. Experiments on great apes have shown that this kind of stimulation actually improves memory.
The second way is to restore the neural connections that existed in the brain before the injury.
- The idea is to restore the functioning of those parts of the brain that are responsible for memory at a normal level, - says one of the authors of this idea, professor at Wake Forest University (USA) Robert Humpson. “In this case, a person will gain access to their old memories and will be able to form new ones.
Scientists from the Pentagon went the first way.
“We believe that we will be able to develop neuroprosthetic devices that will directly interact with the hippocampus and help restore declarative memory,” says Sanchez.
At the same time, the ethical aspect of development raises great concerns. After all, it is possible that if such devices appear, then with their help it will be possible not only to restore the destroyed memory, but also to modify it, for example, erasing unnecessary memories and even changing ethical standards …
“Deception of the human brain is a deception of self-awareness,” said Arthur Kaplan, an expert at Langdon Medical Center at New York University.
Ida SHAKHOVSKAYA