In the following video, Quore AI looks into how **brain alertness** and **emotional impact** work together to shape your memories. Discover how your brain’s focus mode enhances retention, and learn the surprising effects of too much alertness.
We will refer to an “event” as any occurrence we deem worthy of retention in our memory, stored and shaped to be retrieved over time. The retention of an event is deemed high-quality when it is stored for a considerable duration and proves to be accurate upon retrieval. The hypothesis that memory retention quality is proportional to brain alertness during the event and its emotional impact is supported by neuroscience but involves nuanced interactions.
For instance: while heightened alertness increases memory formation, improving focused attention and leading to more accurate encoding of details, excessive alertness (e.g., extreme stress) may hinder encoding.
Another instance of nuanced interaction is what we call “Flashbulb Memories”. High emotional impact creates vivid, long-lasting memories, though accuracy may falter (e.g., recalling traumatic events with confidence but errors in details). Both positive (joy) and negative (fear) emotions enhance retention, but extreme stress or emotional overwhelm (e.g., PTSD) might impair encoding and lead to fragmented or inaccurate memories (e.g., trauma-related repression or distortion).
The interplay between Alertness and Emotional Impact is highly relevant to our case. Alertness not only enhances detail accuracy, but it may also amplify emotional effects. For instance, a highly alert individual during a traumatic event may form stronger memories than someone less alert. Conversely, emotional intensity might compensate for lower alertness by prioritizing gist and longevity. Emotional arousal might sacrifice precision for vividness.
So now that, in Part 1, we have explored the effects of our alertness and emotional arousal state on memory retention, in Part 2, we will compare four types of events (visual, auditory, situational, and cognitive) and how our memory processes each one.
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