Memory and Emotion 3/9/08

Kaila McIntyre-Bader

“Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built…If we remembered everything, we should, on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing. It would take as long for us to recall a space of time as it took the original time to elapse, and we should never get ahead with our thinking” –William James (McGaugh, p126).

While there were many detailed descriptions of tiny events happening on a hormonal/chemical level, this week’s readings made me question a lot of bigger picture moral and ethical issues. It’s interesting that most of McGaugh’s friends and neighbors said they would take and/or give a memory-enhancing drug to their children with little hesitation. I wonder if the reaction and answer would be the same if that question were extended to a different social circle, or better yet a completely different culture or society. The fictitious character Funes the Memorious “remembered not only every lead of every tree of every wood, but also every one of the times he had perceived or imagined it. [Funes was]… let us not forget, almost incapable of ideas of a general, Platonic sort…I suspect that he was not very capable of thought”(p126). The mnemonists S and V.P. both had an incredibly hard time in normal daily life even though they could remember street maps and strings of digits. The human brain has evolved and adapted to make us more fit for survival, and being able to retain every bit of information ever learned is hardly helpful.

But retaining the detailed events of a traumatic experience can be. There are systems in our brains that help us to avoid harmful situations and ensure the passing on of genetic information. It was interesting to read that the brain is designed to allow influences after learning, and that there is an important distinction between learning and performance. The strychnine-saline experiments with the rats showed that administering a stimulant before training and short after training were different things entirely. The first may enhance performance, but the latter enhances memory.

In Chapter 5, McGaugh comments on “flashbulb memories” and the “rehearsing” of memories. I was grateful for the presentation in class on Wednesday because I felt I had a much better understanding of the concepts he was presenting. It was interesting to read about the distinction between the significance of rehearsing and the lack of importance it has on actually creating a flashbulb memory (p91). I also found myself wondering why the idea of emotional arousal affecting memory was being mentioned as a surprising discovery. Maybe I was reading into it too much or reading it incorrectly, but that seems so obvious to me. Memory is a survival tool, and it makes a lot of sense that we would remember things that affect us personally and strongly on an emotional level better than things that do not. The idea of rehearsing a memory is intriguing to me as well. We talked about it a bit in class, but when I read McGaugh’s example of the 1989 earthquake in California, it reminded me of my own experience (p88). I have an extremely vivid memory of that day, yet I would have only been two years old at the time. I can picture the scene in my head and recall the conversation my mother had with my neighbor across the fence while holding me in her arms and waiting to see if there would be an aftershock. But do I really remember that? How much of that is fabricated? (I love how LeDoux assures the reader on page 245 that fabrication is not the same as lying, it is merely remembering falsely). Do I have that memory because my mother has repeated the story to me so many times? Was it traumatic enough for me to hold on to that moment all the way up until now? McGaugh refers to “memory as a creative act” (p116), but I’m pretty sure the jury in a courtroom wouldn’t want to hear that. As I was reading LeDoux’s take on false memories, I found myself uncomfortable because of the ethical implications. It’s interesting to question if the hippocampus is damaged, can victims recall traumatic experiences later on that they had once forgotten? What if the hippocampus shut down all together? I worry about what happens to the victim that cannot recall the traumatic memory for a while and then having it re-surface, especially in a court of law. What if a sexual abuse victim doesn’t recall the memory until later? Will anyone believe him/her? If someone can take a therapist to court for implanting false memories in their head of cults and sexual abuse, will the court then believe the next case based purely on memory? How do we ever know which of these memories are fabricated and which are “real.”

McGaugh goes on to write about “phenomenal memory ability found in autistic children and adults” (p131). I can recall a camper I had at a day camp one summer who could tell me the day of my birthday in any given year, in the near future or years and years away. This and LeDoux’s discussion of disorders and illnesses made me think about the way our society defines a “mental disorder.” Now these autistic children and adults are decidedly “sick,” whereas in another time and place they may have been considered shamans and prophets.

I also found Box 1 on page 3 of LaBar and Cabeza’s article thought provoking. The box says that only 5% of males and 10% of women will suffer from PTSD. Does this mean that women are predisposed to PTSD? Or are more frequently victims of traumatic experiences? Or just more reported? Is this a genetic difference, or a social/cultural one?

I read so much and feel like my brain is about to explode (oh man, maybe a panic attack coming on…? Har har har) and I feel like I could keep writing incoherent strings of reflection and commentary forever, so I’ll end with this last thought. How crazy is the influence of music!? “In these experiments, sad music heard while standing at the bottom of a steep hill led participants to overestimate the incline of the hill. The overestimations were similar to those made by participants wearing a heavy backpack.” (Clore, Huntsinger). It’s amazing that different sounds and frequencies can manipulate our emotions to such an extent.

Memory, Panic, and Conditioned Fear Responses

Tessa Noonan
3/9/08

I really liked the way that both McGaugh and LeDoux described the process of memory and its heavily emotional mechanisms. McGaugh says “we must acknowledge that remembering is a creative act that accesses and uses much more than, as well as much less than, the information originally stored” (p. 118). Although this seems a little confusing and contradictory, I think McGaugh’s point follows the integrative and thus often unreliable aspects of memory production and recall that factor into the way we remember a particular event.
Of course, this becomes particularly relevant in studies and cases that both authors cited in which adults are made to relive false past experiences of child abuse, for example, the memories of which have been “repressed.” I was interested in the diverging ways McGaugh and LeDoux describe this phenomenon, and the entire Freudian conception of repression in itself. McGaugh comes down very hard on this idea, stating that there is absolutely no scientific basis for “repression” in any form, and that emotionally significant memories cannot just be recovered from this phase. LeDoux, on the other hand, grants this theory scientific validity on the grounds of “hypermesia” (p. 245). Is there a way to isolate these differences into a coherent frame of reference, or is there too little known about this phenomenon to concretely know whether or not repression can take place?

On another note, I thought LeDoux’s description of phobias and anxiety in the form of fear conditioning was extremely helpful in understanding both memory processes and fear conditioning that LeDoux primarily studies. This synthesis proved very useful in describing and beginning to understand panic attacks, phobias, and disorders such as PTSD. Particularly interesting to me was the inherent connection that we’ve seen countless times between the Schacter and Singer findings of interpretive evaluation and the fear reaction that becomes conditioned via bodily response. As in Wolpe’s conditioning theory of panic, the primarily stimulus reaction takes place on an internal level, which is then attributed to an external stimuli that becomes the conditioned fear stimuli. Combining our analysis of the amygdala from last week, and the emotionally salient and indiscriminate response from the “low road” through the amygdala, it is quite easy (and fascinating) to see how someone experiencing PTSD symptoms might mistake a slamming door for a gunshot, just like someone else might mistake a tree branch for a snake.

Anxiety

Katie Moeller

I found this week’s chapter from LeDoux to be perhaps one of the most interesting we have read so far. Part of this could be because I feel that the further into the book (and into our class discussions) that I get, the better able I am to place LeDoux’s ideas within the context of the other readings about emotions that we’re doing. As his point becomes clearer with more and more evidence and support, so too am I clearer on how his work on the fear system both feeds into and is fed by discussions of other concepts concerning emotions.

In addition to those factors, I was also really intrigued by Chapter 8 because it is primarily focused on anxiety, a topic in which I have both academic and personal interest. One of my conference papers last semester looked at the role of anxiety in our first years of life as primarily adaptive, and one of the ways that we all learn to predict and navigate the many “dangers” of the world. While I was working primarily within a psychoanalytic framework, much of what I learned through my project correlates with LeDoux’s assessment of anxiety as a type of fear, often unresolved and related to an internal rather than an external stimulus. I was happy to see that LeDoux clarifies that anxiety in and of itself is not pathological, because while people see to have an easy time excusing their own fear reactions or the fear reactions of others (perhaps because it is easier to locate a “cause”), it seems that the very fact of anxiety makes many people anxious and uncomfortable.

I was particularly struck by Miller’s experiments, which LeDoux describes on page 233. After a phase of basic fear conditioning in which a buzzer signified a shock, rats learned to jump over a hurdle, in order to avoid the shock. Thus, the rats jumped the hurdle at every buzzer, even if the shock was turned off. While originally the rats jumping the hurdle would shut off the buzzer, Miller then left the buzzer on until the rats learned to press a lever. He then stopped the lever from controlling the buzzer, and chose something else. The rats were able to learn these new responses in succession, even though the original shock was never again administered with the buzzer. What Miller felt this illustrated, and what I found fascinating, was the incredible strength of fear as a motivator, and the lengths that living creatures will go to in order to avoid the recurrence of a painful or uncomfortable situation. This illustration seemed to me to be very indicative of how anxiety works, and the way in which, as a self-protective measure, our fear of one situation can lead us to avoid not only that particular scenario, but also other scenarios that we associate with the original scenario, because of some intermediate trigger which may have been completely unrelated to our original discomfort.

Another element of LeDoux’s examination of anxiety that I was very interested in was the role the amygdala plays in laying down unconscious memories of a traumatic learning situation. Because the amygdala has been described as the “quick and dirty” route for processing emotions - producing coarser, less specific assessments than the cortical regions - it makes sense that in certain types of anxious responses there is not as clear a picture of the cause of the response. LeDoux writes, “The subcortical pathway, not being very capable of making fine distinctions, may produce learning that more freely spreads to other stimuli,” (p. 255).

As a person who has dealt with some recurrent anxiety in my life, I can confirm that from an insider perspective, this is what anxiety feels like; it feels like it is coarse, unpredictable, and widely generalized. While there are specific situations in which I can expect to feel a certain level of anxiety (with all its lovely features - butterflies in my stomach, blushing, shakiness, etc.), there are also at times these total curveball situations in which I feel myself having the anxious reactions before I am even aware of why I am anxious. When I do finally get the chance to cognitively assess the response, I am often a bit perplexed about what exactly triggered my anxiety at that time, and whether or not I can then expect to react in a similar way the next time I face that situation again.

LeDoux points out that in trying to determine the origin of an anxious response there is added complexity because as a result of stress levels and chemicals associated with increased stress, a conscious memory of the traumatic learning experience is not always stored. Nevertheless, because the amygdala is still hard at work even despite stress (and maybe working harder, for that matter), it is possible to form and store “very powerful, implicit, unconscious emotional memories” (p. 245) that can stay with us and affect our behavior without our knowledge of why. Especially interesting to me, in light of my presentation with Molly last week on flashbulb memory, is the fact that while the intensity of our anxious and phobic responses do seem influenced by the level of personal meaning associated with the triggering object or stimulus, this does not necessarily guarantee that our memory of the original learning condition is vivid, let alone accessible.

Memory

Kevin Goldstein

This week’s readings represent a treasure-trove of fascinating tidbits on affect and memory—especially regarding the question of the durability of memory—which I am still trying to bring together into a cohesive whole. In lieu of a grand narrative, then, perhaps an examination of the tidbits is in order.

LeDoux makes a profoundly intriguing point: in highly stressful situations, adrenal steroids can act upon the hippocampus in such a way as to impair explicit conscious memory. In contrast, such situations either have a neutral influence or actually enhance the operations of the amygdala. The latter would seem to make perfect sense in the creation of lasting fear-conditioned responses; in short, the longevity of implicit memory. Meanwhile, LeDoux examines the way in which fear-conditioning can imperfectly shapes responses—anxiety disorders such as phobias represent instances in which the fear-response is in great excess of the real threat posed by the stimuli. The fear system breaks loose from cortical controls.

At the same time, McGaugh writes in his “Meandering and Monumental Memory” chapter of traumatic events and their relationship to later stimuli-response scenarios. In extreme cases, a black hole around a traumatic memory ensues in which stimuli unrelated to the prime traumatic stimulus become associated with it. The stereotypical example is that of the Vietnam veteran driven into a terrific fright seemingly by the slightest occurrence, literally replaying a traumatic memory or memories. Like LeDoux, McGaugh outlines instances in which a highly stressful situation leaves an indelible mark on the experiencing subject. I was rather struck by the discourse on drugs as memory enhancers or inhibitors, paralleling our discussion in class concerning the latter’s potential use with soldiers immediately after traumatic experiences (though perhaps more preventative measures are in order there!)

Another parallel with our discussion in class relates to so-called flashbulb memories, or the relationship between affect and long-term memory. Significant public events are indeed remembered over time; herein consequentiality and emotional response are fundamental to such durability. Nevertheless, very often memories meander, and thus make evident the constructive nature of memory. All memories are reconstructions in that they involves the interaction of many parts of the brain, but nonetheless remembering can often walk a fine line between reconstruction and creative necessity, where a specific event, such as a robbery, for example, is blended with similar past experiences and a generic notion of what a robbery entails. As Bartlett argues, coherence can often supersede accuracy.

(Warning: some pseudo-philosophical meandering follows) What is accuracy, or objective memory then but an abstract, a perennial hypothetical? Memory is the interrelationship between perception and events in time and space. To the extent that no subject perceives with disinterest, then no event exists independent of those who perceive and thus construct it. This brings us back to the Clore-Huntsinger article and the “affect-as-information” hypothesis. Cognitive processes are interwoven with the affective information which underlies them, once more contesting the emotion-reason dichotomy.

Seahorses and Almonds

Molly McDonough
3.9.2008

I thought a lot about what Aidan said last class about why flashbulb memories aren’t present in situations of happiness, or surprises of joy. I’m not even sure these readings explain the answer. The only solution I could come up with is that happiness is something universally understood, people make us happy, music makes us happy and for whatever reason happiness is communal. It is very easy to say, I am happy because of… and therefore I think happiness lives in the moment.
Stress and sadness on the other hand are indicative to the person. Sadness during a certain event can be based on a history of sadness linked to something/someone in the past, or related circumstances to something more personal. And when I look bad I remember more of the times I’ve cried over things, than the times I have laughed. That is sad. But I was talking to Kaila and I think we agreed it could go the opposite way as well.
The chapter in LeDoux focuses on the effects of anxiety and how anxiety, stress, and fear play a role in the making of memories. I was struck by the concept of fear-relevant and fear-irrelevant stimuli. Snakes are still a more effective stimulus for fear, even more so than guns and knives. What?? How many people have even come across a snake? A gun or a knife? This is disturbing, we have not evolved to fear these tools of destruction when they are much more available in our society than snakes. Maybe media is the anti-anxiety drug we have been taking to eliminate our stresses, and the more we see the less we fear.
Chapter 4 of McGaugh begins with the question of whether or not people would give their children memory enhancements if they didn’t have a learning disability. I don’t know. Isn’t having a good memory a part of our personality? Should everyone have a good memory? What are all these things we need to remember so readily? I’m not sure people would get along as well as they do if we remembered everything we told one another. McGaugh leads into FBM as well, mentioning Brown and Kulik. He went over the categories in the descriptions and the details of what makes a FBM different. FBM is all about the details, even though our reaction to a tragedy is described as “emotions evoked,” is it even about our emotions or the reaction to the emotions of others?

"Promiscuous Amygdala”

Molly Moody

The amygdala gets around. McGaugh’s interpretation of memory consolidation existing among a network of brain locales is not surprising. Similar to our previous discussion on the adaptation of emotions stemming from different areas of the brain; memory also seems to originate in a series of steps from a number of locations. The amygdala influences memory consolidation for any kind of information by temporarily influencing other brain regions; the ultimate bachelor. I found LaBar’s paper a little overwhelming, but it was interesting to watch him converge with our study of Pavlov and LeDoux’s fear conditioning. He was quick to point out that the amygdala plays an important role in encoding, consolidating, and reconsolidating retrieved memories. The amygdala’s link with memory even makes its way into my dreams as McGaugh suggests it may play an important role in memory consolidation through sleeping and dreaming. I always attributed my ability to recite lines for the school play only after a night’s sleep sheer luck, but the dream theory is certainly a more provable one. I must wonder, couldn’t memory recall post sleep be attributed to greater vigor and less fatigue thus better recall rather than the repetition exhibited by dreams?
LaBar makes an interesting point in explaining that emotion in memory “facilitates consolidation processes, which take time to emerge” (55). After reading this I was somewhat confused over which process has a greater impact upon memory: repetition, time, or arousal? After completing all of the readings, however, I believe they focus most prominently on arousal’s and its relationship with time, rather than one extreme over the other. McGaugh mentions the stress hormone, epinephrine, acting as a stimulant drug that alters memory consolidation in his rat/foot shock experiment (p98). This idea is backed up with LaBar’s mention of emotion benefiting memory “particularly after sever or prolonged stress” (p54).
Clore’s paper was a very interesting continuation on the discussion of fabricated memories from last week’s post. His paper suggests emotions affect problem-solving, stereotypes, and persuasion; this is most certainly frightening when taken into consideration the emphasis we put on separating the rational from the emotional.