Oliver Edwards
The Scent of Bitter Almonds
We are all familiar with the phenomenon of a seemingly neutral stimulus becoming a catalyst for strong, vivid emotional memory. Our sensory modalities, especially the olfactory, have a remarkable ability to construct emotional cues for our long-term memory using all the sensory information that becomes associated with an emotional event. The McGaugh reading, more than any other, has helped me to clarify scientifically some of these ideas in a way that had previously only made sense to me in the literary realm.
In the LeDoux reading we have been geared up for his unfolding expertise on the structure of fear conditioning, and he has just now begun to discuss how fear memories are formed. It seems, however, that we get a clearer picture from the generalized viewpoint taken by McGaugh. He walks us through the origins of emotional neuroscience, emphasizing important points about many of the misconceptions we have and the false starts in the history of neuroscience.
I was very interested in and surprised at the section on Pavlov. First of all, it is important to note that Pavlov did not want to be considered a psychologist, that he considered the largely introspective field of psychology to be unscientific. He therefore considered himself purely a physiologist. This is ironic considering that he is a household name in psychology. More importantly, McGaugh points out that Pavlov was fundamentally wrong in that he supposed memory to be a direct Stimulus Response habit formation. Perhaps in an overzealous attempt to be more objective and avoid the anthropomorphization of his dogs, he supposed their memories to be, not only mechanistic, but simplistically hard wired to act directly based on stimulus response.
McGaugh guides us gracefully through the research that has picked this theory apart, proving that animals and humans have mechanisms for forming memories that are more dynamic, and thus determining which brain areas allow us to do this. He then goes on to discuss memory consolidation, illustrating the phenomenon of delay memory formation. This has enormous implications for the understanding of how rich, emotionally potent memories can be associated with varying stimuli. He posits that memory consolidation takes a long time because it could be evolutionarily adaptive to allow a variety of sensory input to influence the memory, and everything surrounding the emotional event must be absorbed into the memory. This may just bring science closer to the mystery of how bitter almonds could make one think of unrequited love.
5 comments:
As we all have been saying, and as was so concretely stated in our readings, the emotional content of our memories does certainly make them all the more tangible upon revisiting them. As Oliver brings up the example of the scent of bitter almonds, I feel obligated to describe my extremely coincidental experience from just today: I onced found a cockroach in my room, and stunned it by spraying it with a bottle of Febreze that was handy. While I was doing laundy today, I sprayed the same bottle, and the scent so strongly reminded me of the incident that I actually lept back in fright of the cockroach from months ago. I thought it was a great example, with excellent timing...
I also wanted to address a topic that LeDoux mentions very briefly but does not expand upon: on p. 207he describes the use of chemical adrenaline-blockers to blunt emotional trauma in memory immediately following a potentially scarring event (for soliders, firefighters, rape victims, etc.). I thought this was a very intersting topic, and one that deserves a lot of consideration. I must say my initial reaction was a twinge of horror at the concept of stopping the emotional processes that make us "feel," especially in the aftermath of a traumatic event. Certainly something woth thinking about.
Sorry, previous comment by Tessa Noonan, 3/4/08
As is often the case when I read LeDoux, this week's chapters were no exception in leaving me with a number of questions about how the concepts used to illustrate the emotional processes involved in the fear response relate to or can be more generalized to include other types of emotional responses. In particular, I am curious about the extension of the following two concepts:
-In describing fear conditioning in rats, LeDoux outlines the way in which one stimulus (a sound) can become associated with another, dangerous stimulus (a shock), resulting in a fear response to the learned trigger. What I wonder is whether or not this concept can be applied to a stimulus that is internal - a memory, say - which has through experience has become associated with a negative emotion, and thus triggers a fear response, or, even more broadly, some other type of defensive response such as denial or anger. This may be overstepping the bounds of the idea of learned triggers, but it is what came to mind when I was reading as a way of applying the theory more psychologically.
-I was left wanting to know more about LeDoux's assertion that "social situations are often survival encounters," (p. 177). I would agree with him, and I am particularly interested in how many of the very adaptive processes we've been looking at in regards to emotion are translated into the ways that we live today. These days, things being as they are, I'm much more likely to feel like I switch into "survival" mode when I run into someone at a party that I really, really do not want to see than to have to have to survive a bear in the woods or a snake on the path. Yet these adaptive responses must be useful to us in modern times, or surely they would have been phased out. And so, I'd love to know more about the ways they are operating in our daily lives in social or other situations.
I think the combination of memory and emotions has a way of bringing people together that is different from other emotional combinations. Everyone has emotions just as everyone has memories, what allows us to talk about our emotions in the form of memories more readily than in the form of emotions themselves? Maybe as Oliver has put it, it is "the scent of bitter almonds" or as LeDoux says "bicycling. Speaking english. The Pledge of Allegiance. Multiplication by 7s. The rules of dominoes..." Through all these readings I couldn't help but wonder what comes first the memory or the emotion.
In the Dolcos, LaBar, and Cabeza study it completely makes sense that events that cause more emotional arousal are easier to remember, but where does the initial emotional arousal begin?
I also thought that the McGaugh reading was particularly useful in clearing up a few points that I had questions on. As I have just been doing similar research for my research paper, I was a little stunned by the blunt manner in which McGaugh knocks down the work done by Pavlov. Certainly there are many issues concerning conditioned responses which have changed over time with more extensive research, but I admired Pavlov's attempt to give non-human animals some point of view. Though I admire Pavlov I realize that memory is not the outcome of repetitions but the potential to reflect upon given repetitions in life.
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