I just finished reading a book about how the brain works called Mind Wide Open by Stephen Johnson. It was really interesting. If I were writing a book review I would say it was "pretty good". The author uses himself as an example throughout and that gets a little...uninteresting, but the over all topic, and themes in the book are quite thought provoking. Like many of my other reads, I won't retell the whole story here. I will just pick one part to share.
Johnson makes a really good point in one of the later chapters about the state (or character) of the field of psychology that seemed very obvious once I read it, but not so much beforehand.
For the past hundred years everything in psychology has come directly out of the work done by Sigmund Freud, even though almost everything he proposed is outdated. We know (or hopefully at least speculate) that we don't have romantic attachments to our parents. That one is glaringly obvious. But there are hundreds of other, more subtle ideas that Freud brought to the field that are still considered current by modern psychologists today. We might roll our eyes when someone brings up the "Oedipus Complex", but we feel fairly comfortable discussing our Ego. We feel even more comfortable with the idea that we repress painful memories. We don't think we repress our bad experiences we just assume we do. This is my toppic for this blog: repression.
As it turns out neuroscience is beginning to cast doubt on our tightly grasped notions of repression. Through fMRI scans, and a host of tests, and experiments (which you can read about ad nauseum in the book) scientists can literally see what is happening in your brain (and where) while you are thinking. And it makes sense to know that different parts of the brain light up depending on the task your brain is focused on.
But how would our thinking about ourselves change if we realized that we are not secretly trying to bury painful memories? Would they seem as elusive and debilitating if we understood that we were not purposely trying to hide from those memories, but that our brain is just doing what it "normally" does?The first question we have to ask ourselves is why do we have memories in the first place? The quick answer is to protect us.
Consciousness is located in the frontal part of the brain. The closer you get to the brain stem the "older" evolutionarily speaking you get. Located just above the brain stem is your amygdala. It's where your gut feelings and instincts come from. As it turns out the amygdala stores it's own memories, separate from your conscious ones. There are a couple reasons for this. The first is that when back when the amygdala was first evolved, there was no frontal lobe to store memories, so they had to be kept somewhere. Babies store memories here before their brains fully develop. That's also why most animals have some sort of memory, but it is more instinctual and less specific than our own. The second reason is that the amygdala can recall memories much faster than your consciousness can, but the trade off is the image is much fuzzier. It's like comparing a tape recording to a digital one. The information still gets across (i.e. you can tell what song it is) but you might not be able to hear the base line or individual notes of the guitar solo clearly.
But what I am getting at is that ALL traumatic memories are stored in the amygdala, but they may or may not be stored in conscious memory. The best way I can think of to explain this is by using an example. It might be a long one, but I think it's worth reading.
I am afraid of bees. No that's not true. I am terrified of bees. My conscious memory and my instinctual memory have responded to this fact in separate ways. My conscious memory recalls two or three of the worst bee stings I received over the course of my life, and taught me never to stand on fallen tree trunks (because there might be a yellow jacket hive inside). It usually takes a bit of time to conjure up the details of these events, but once I do I remember them pretty clearly. My primitive memory doesn't really feel like a memory at all but it's sort of like a blurry idea that forms almost instantaneously in my head in certain moments. I constantly find myself swatting and freaking out over anything that is smallish and flies by my head. I respond the same to a harmless little butterfly flitting past my ear as I do to a wasp. Once I see it's a butterfly I am OK (consciousness), but it takes a couple of minutes for the Adrenalin to wear off. What is happening here? Well, for all it's lack of detail the amygdala is super speedy. A fly zips past my ear and without missing a beat my hand flies up, I duck my head, and my heart starts beating faster. My amygdala has just crudely recalled a very frightening memory but stripped it down to the barest essentials. It is bascially saying "small+dark shape+ flying by head= duck and get away". It remembers just enough to protect me from a bee (which is why I constantly mistake flies and moths for bees), but not enough to differentiate between a humming bird and a yellow jacket. If the insect were flying by in super slow motion and I was able to get a good look at it before it flew past, then a butterfly wouldn't scare me. But who has that kind of time?
But getting to my point. I don't remember every time I have been stung or every close encounter I have had with stinging insects. My conscious memory is just not that good, especially when I go farther back into my childhood, before my brain was fully developed. But even as a little kid I remember being scared of bees. That is presumably because although I have no recollection at all, I was probably stung as a two year old and learned to be afraid. I am not repressing that memory though, I simply didn't record it in my consciousness (either because my amygdala did a good enough job on it's own of storing it) or it got lost among all the new memories I have formed since then. I don't need a two-year-olds conscious memory (which was just developing) because my brain can protect me just fine with the more primitive one.
There are lots of memories that for whatever reason our consciousness has decided to abandon. Usually it has to do with utility. Just think about all the happy memories you don't remember! But our amygdala is not so likely to loosen it's grip, especially on things that frighten or upset us. Each time we have a feeling, but no conscious memory of why we feel that way, we assume we are purposely trying to hide from something that we just can't deal with. But what if that's not true. What if we aren't cowards? What if our brains, being the efficient machines that they are, just decided to get rid of the memory because it already had an adequate backup in the amygdala? I don't need to have a clear memory of every time in my life I have seen a bee. Just one or two is enough, and a vague plan to duck and swat if anything happens to fly by my ear has saved me more than once. It may seem a little archaic but it works.
I don't mean to imply that trauma like child abuse is exactly the same as a phobia of bees or spiders, but knowing that we are not hiding from our feelings and our past may be of great use in empowering us to let it go. As an adult you may not clearly remember being locked in the closet when you were little, but it's not because you are afraid (or can't face) of the memory now. It's because your brain got rid of it because you don't need it. Your brain has said "Hey, we don't need those log drawn out memories. They are a waste of space. The amygdala has it all under control. It says small room+ darkness= get out fast. That's all we need to remember to protect ourselves from now on."
In conclusion (I feel like this has been a really long post) I think there is a lot we can learn from neuroscience, especially when it comes to how we perceive ourselves and how we feel about our active roll in processing the events in our lives. The idea of repression is victimizing, whereas understanding how your brain works is amazing and empowering. Freud's psychology is a thing of the past. For a hundred years his ideas of sexual motivation for all things, and repression, made the brain something to be feared, and not to be trusted. But that time has passed (thank goodness!). Listen to your brain, appreciate it's complexity, and take comfort in the fact that it works 24 hours a day to protect you.
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