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Before we talking about declarative memories, let's take a detour into
an emotional type of memory that really has, is a problem for many people.
And that's the emotional memories of a traumatic event.
So, many people suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder.
And in that situation there are triggers bat that remind and individual of an
initial traumatic event, that then, evoke a
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Or less evocative of an emotional reaction.
So, if you look at a neutral situation and a, a very highly charged situation,
emotionally charged situation, which one will you remember,
which one are you more likely to remember.
Well your more likely to remember the emotionally charged situation.
If I show you a photograph of a car that's intact, and if i
show you a photograph of a car that's been in a horrific car accident.
You're going to remember details about the car and the scenery
in the emotional photograph, far more than you will in the neutral photograph.
And that's because emotion is going to facilitate memory formation.
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And that is a great thing, because we don't want to fill up
our memory banks with all sorts of boring details about stuff that we
don't really care about; we want to remember things that we have a
lot ofâthat are impactful to our lives, that make a difference to us.
And those are emotional events.
So we remember the moment that we saw the person
that we're going to spend the rest of our lives with.
We remember the birth of a child; we remember
the death of a friend, or of a parent.
These things are impactful; they're going to make a difference, and
they are preferentially remembered over more mundane and everyday events.
So, in this situation of witnessing or being the victim of a trauma,
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the, there are a lot of details about the sensory
environment that are associated with that trauma, and then re-exposure to those
details can trigger the same emotional
reaction that the original trauma triggered.
That is essentially what happens with post-traumatic stress disorder.
What a person is triggered by seeing something that reminds them of the
initial trauma or hearing something or
smelling something, something in the sensory environment
reminds them of that emo, of that original trauma and now they get transported,
their body gets transported and once again they're in that same emotional place.
And that can be both that can be very debilitating.
So what can we do about that?
What we can do about that, what people are starting to
do about that, is to take the emotion out of it.
And so essentially what, if you recall from
our discussion of emotion, emotion has a brain
component and a body component, and it really
works best when those two are working together.
But let's take out the body component.
Let's give a person beta blockers.
Beta blockers are drugs that oppose the effects of the sympathetic nervous system.
This, the nervous, the part of our autonomic nervous
system that gets us very aroused and excited and
afraid and and, and gives us a lot of energy to fight or to flee or to react.
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And if we give somebody beta blockers and we expose them to the triggers of the
event, the trauma that they experienced, now they are triggered,
but now they experience it without the full emotion.
In fact with very blunted or muted or no emotion.
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So now they can remake, they can make a new memory.
They can consolidate that, they can with beta
blockers on board, they can consolidate that memory.
They can remake that memory without all the emotions.
And then the next time they're exposed to the trigger, hopefully,
they'll remember the experience that they had with the beta blockers on board.
So they'll remember the non-emotional experience.
So if you expose them time and time again to the trigger with beta
blockers on board, the hope is that you can unlearn the initial association
between the trigger and the, the
emotional arousal and emotional reaction, and relearn
the fact that this trigger does not, in fact, elicit a big emotional response.
And this is a, a treatment that I think has a lot of promise for a lot of people.
Un, unfortunately there's a lot of trauma in this world
and a lot of people suffer after experiencing those traumas.
Okay so we'll go on to declarative memories.
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Peggy MasonProfessor
