Why epics are more memorable

[Rad]

For all you

 

New research on mice could explain why you remember a breakup (or epic Pickets bushwhack) so vividly but can't for the life of you recall that meeting you had at work.

 

With information bombarding our senses like the billboard lights in Times Square, our brains can get overloaded. That's why memory-storing regions of the brain weed out the trivial and give priority to the significant, which can then get transformed into long-term memory.

 

The new study, published in the Oct. 5 issue of the journal Cell, reveals how emotions could help the brain "decide" which memories to seal in and which to toss out.

 

Memories are thought to form with the strengthening of connections between neurons. These connections rely on receptors to send and receive "brain data."

 

Past research has shown that emotional stress is linked with an increase in the hormone norepinephrine in the brain. Yet, exactly how the stress hormone influences the processes involved in neuron connections and thus memory formation has remained mysterious.

 

Hailan Hu of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory in New York and colleagues say they have figured part of it out. They ran lab tests on mice, finding that norepinephrine, as well as emotional stress, leads to a chemical change in certain brain receptors. The change strengthened connections in the memory regions in mice brains, they say.

 

"Stimuli that would not be enough to form a memory now can form a memory," said study team member Roberto Malinow, also of Cold Spring Harbor Lab.

 

Since mouse brains have many of the same regions as human brains, the researchers expect the same memory mechanisms would apply to us as well.

 

While both highs and lows in life can spark the memory-boosting chemical, Malinow notes that too much of the stress hormone can backfire, causing a lapse in memory.

 

"If you have too much norepinephrine it works the opposite way," Malinow told LiveScience. "So there might be an optimal amount of norepinephrine so that if you're too emotional, you might not remember things as well."

 

He stressed the finding is just one piece of a large puzzle linking emotions and memory.

[RideT61]

So the reseach says that we remember memorable events better, because they are more memorable than events that are not memorable. On the other hand, if an event is too memorable, we might not remember it.

Edited October 5, 2007 by RideT61

[Rad]

Actually, stress is the key.

High stress = memorable.

Low stress = less memorable.

[MATT_B]

Actually, stress is the key.

High stress = memorable.

Low stress = less memorable.

 

Does this explain why I can't remember the last time I had a real vacation?

[Dechristo]

...Malinow notes that too much of the stress hormone can backfire, causing a lapse in memory.

 

"If you have too much norepinephrine it works the opposite way," ...

 

the mechanics of repression?

[EWolfe]

Because, as I have been quoted as saying: "Some trips you never fully come back from"

[AlpineK]

Yeah, I've returned to my house many times, but I've never left a large number of trips.

[wayne]

Because, as I have been quoted as saying: "Some trips you never fully come back from"

Gosh E did you ever think that private message would become so famous? It is an instant classic. Maybe you should write more?

[cj001f]

Yeah, I've returned to my house many times, but I've never left a large number of trips.

 

 

GIMME BACK MY BLOTTER BITCH!

[ScottP]

Most of my memories stem from difficult, stressful or amazing (to me) experiences. My first memory (as a short video clip in my head) is of being amazed by heavy rain clouds moving rapidly across the sky as I lay on the front seat of my parents station wagon after waking up during a camping trip. I watched the clouds as my mom put on my shoes and socks. I related this memory to her some years back. She told me I was almost two at the time.

Below is a story I wrote from memory, based on my expriences as a child. Much of what I wrote I can still see clearly in my mind as pictures or 'video clips'. Each of the events is something that has stuck in my mind, I believe, due to the intense nature of the experience. Read it or don't. The memories I recount are epic, or harrowing aspects of my life...

 

 

Even as a small child I remember bumping my head a lot. My earliest remembrance of this collection of cranial mishaps comes even before kindergarten. I had borrowed all of the elastic headband things that my sister's used to hold their hair back. Pretending to be an Indian, with all of these headband things strapped to my forehead, I ran whooping throughout the house, just like the Indians on TV would do. Since there were so many of these headband things on my forehead, some of them slipped down over my eyes. Running hither and yon, I tripped on some unseen object (probably my feet), and crashed into the edge of the coffee table. The resulting, copious head-wound-type bleeding ruined every one of those headband things, much to my sister's chagrin.

There is in my memory a brief hiatus in the string of injuries I had started with the infamous Head Band Incident (This is not to say they didn't occur so much as I just can't remember them.). This lull ended quite abruptly one fine June day in 1964 when I suffered a karmic fall from a sycamore tree while trying to steal baby sparrows from the nest. The ensuing broken left femur and lacerated chin provided me with the experience of six weeks on my back in traction (with weights attached to pull the upper and lower halves of my femur back into something resembling normal postiton), and another four weeks in a cast that extended from my armpits down the length of my left leg to just short of my toes. Not letting a little thing like this keep me down (literally), I was eventually up and lumbering around in this plaster leisure suit. In retrospect, I imagine I looked something like a cross between the Mummy and Frankenstein. The resulting pressure on my abdomen from standing in the cast was diagnosed as the cause of a mysterious bout of vomiting, so I was required to stay off my feet. This two and a half months of forced immobility resulted in a pair of severely atrophied lower limbs. After removing the cast, the doctor thought it would be a good idea for me to start riding a bike in order that I might avoid wearing braces on my incredibly skimpy legs. So I did, and quickly collided with the back of my Aunt Betty’s maroon, '64 Dodge Dart that was parked in front of our house. The patching I got from my friend, Doctor "Damned Two-Wheel Vehicles!" Johnson, came complete with a nifty pressure bandage wound turban-like around my head. (It was said that all I needed was an American flag, a fife, and a drum to complete the ensemble.)

I started first grade walking on crutches with this serious looking pressure bandage wrapped around my head. It made for a lot of 'fun' kickball games and childish ridicule. I began riding the bike I had borrowed from Lonny Bitzer. It was too small for me, but it had two 'damned' wheels, so I eventually got pretty cocky on the thing. Too cocky, in fact: Taft, CA. is pretty well known for very few reasons. One of them is the size of the tumbleweeds that occasionally roll through town. One of the larger of the species found its way onto our street one fall day. It looked pretty spindly, so I decided that I would ride my borrowed bike Evel Kneivel-style right through it and send it shattering into a million pieces. Tumbleweeds are pretty resilient. This one launched me like a rocket straight up into the air. I remember being pretty high up, the street seeming to get narrower below me. Surprisingly, I recovered from the ensuing landing fairly quickly and got back on my bike, muttering six-year-old oaths at the demon weed as I wobbled away.

I have, after much contemplation, come to the conclusion that the reason I was able to shake off this pair of post-femur-break launch and splash down episodes was due to the high pain threshold I had gained from The Nurse at The Hospital. She spent much time, and seemed to gain fiendish delight in torturing me in the name of medicine while I lay helpless with a fractured femur and festering chin stitches. She was a wicked, rough old bitch who had me do pull-ups on a bar suspended over my bed while she changed the sheets underneath me. She wouldn't answer my buzzer at night, causing me to pee on myself. Upon discovering this aberrant behavior, she would sternly reprimand me for being so "messy". I’ve heard children wondering where the legs go when Dorothy and Toto land Auntie Em's house on the Wicked Witch of the East. Glenda and those munchkins have us believing that she’s dead. Well, she isn't. She’s very much alive and still working at Memorial Hospital in Bakersfield, California because witches are immortal, you know.

As a child I was always experimenting with cause and effect relationships; like what happens when you put a board on a fulcrum with a rock on one end and then you jump on the other end.

"It hits you in the head." was the observation I made during this experiment.

Several stitches over my right eye was the resulting prognosis made by my friend, Doctor Johnson. Many years later, while studying physics, I happened upon a description of Newton's Third Law of Motion: "Whenever one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body exerts a force on the first body; these forces are equal in magnitude and oppositely directed." I pondered this concept only briefly before coming to conclusion that if Newton had been beaned by a six pound chunk of quartz instead of just an apple, he might have deleted the "...these forces are equal in magnitude..." part.

I was never really big on playing team sports, but that never stopped me from being enthused about the game of hitting rocks with a pick axe handle to see how far they would go. Neighborhood friends also found great satisfaction in this seemingly harmless pastime. Stevie Kranyak was particularly adept at batting rocks, and was in fact, the first switch hitter I ever met. I found out about switch-hitting by standing on the wrong side of him as he pasted a line drive into the fields across the street. His follow through pasted me to the ground, adding to the bump that my Aunt Betty's '65 Dodge Dart had permanently affixed to my forehead and drawing yet another draft of blood. My father, apparently afraid of the pointed questions now coming from the staff of my friend, Doctor Johnson, figured that this latest opening in my flesh could be mended with a butterfly bandage. He was right and the resulting scar caused by Stevie's scathing swing and my inattention to his left- handedness is probably less obvious for this first aid than the stitches my friend, Doctor Johnson, would have cussingly installed.

As time went by, the usual cuts, abrasions, and contusions a healthy boy will incur during normal play were interspersed with the unusual events that only someone cursed with a bump-prone head can appreciate. I faintly remember walking to school one day, totally engrossed in a book, when a telephone pole stepped in my way and cold cocked me in the forehead. My cousin Liane found this to be particularly amusing. She was walking right next to me and could have warned me, if her pentient for witnessing such amusing sights hadn’t interfered with her family-held duty of warning me of such imminent danger.

The next catastrophe that befell the region above my torso was after we had moved to the other side of town (which really wasn't much of a move given the diminutive size of Taft). I had acquired my own Stingray bike and was steadily increasing proficiency in its operation. I’d learned how to ride long wheelies, and it was this very activity that was the reason for my next demise. That, and the fact that I failed to put lock washers on the nuts of the front wheel axle. Dropping off the curb in a full wheelie right in front of my house, the front tire popped off and rolled across the street. The now-bare forks bit into the pavement, and milliseconds later so did my chin. It was, in fact, the first part of me to touch down. I remember hearing my friend Glenn, who was riding next to me, say, "Ooooo!", as though he knew the excruciating pain I had just experienced. I got up off the ground in a bell-rung stupor, blood dripping onto my shirt, and headed for my house. Seeing my sister's boyfriend coming out of the front door, I managed a feeble, "Help?", before pitching face first into the lawn, out like a light. When I awoke, I was on my bed. My sister's boyfriend was holding a towel to my chin. My sisters were running around frantically giving my mom reports on my condition while she calmly put on her make-up in another part of the house. I suppose that for her these events had become pretty mundane. I heard my friend, Doctor Johnson, even before he entered the emergency room. He came in cussing, cussed while he stitched me up, and I could still hear him cussing long after he had left. That night, with a jaw that would only open a matter of millimeters, I sat down to a steak dinner prepared by my mom. Fortunately, the baked potatoes mashed up pretty well and I was able to take some sustenance that evening. "Why steak?", I still ask myself.

Even as an adult I'm not immune to connecting my head to immoveable objects with a certain degree of force: I have never been very good at finding things in big stores. One day I was walking through a big hardware store diligently trying to find some object by looking down each aisle as I walked by. I never did find what I was looking for, but I did find one of the concrete-filled metal support poles that holds up the roof. It nailed me right on the Dodge-Dart-chunk-of-granite-pick-axe-handle bump, completely blinding me and sending me to the floor. All I remember as I went down was some unseen guy saying ,"Ooooo!", as though he knew the excruciating pain I felt at that moment. (There is no way he could have known the pain I felt at that moment.) I blindly picked myself up off the floor. This still unseen person asked me if I was okay. I lied that I was fine and started taking a few wobbly steps as my vision began to return. Stumbling around the big hardware store, bell-rung and vision-blurred, I tried my darndest to remember why I was there. To this day I do not know what it was I was looking for. I have probably since purchased it for I'm certain there was a need for it, but even if this is the case, I'm sure I never related it to the TKO I suffered at the hardness of that concrete-filled metal pole.

 

Wood can be a pretty springy thing. Sometimes it's not. Cutting kindling to keep a coldsnap at bay two years ago, I gained a new rule: Cutting across vertical grain with a hatchet has different outcomes than cutting with the grain. A piece of 1x2 vertical grain fir sprung up from an impatient blow. The point of a 45 degree cut on the end hit me right above the right eye cutting a vertical smile and knocking me senseless. Slowly recovering from the stun, I looked for the piece of wood. It took me a some time as it was five feet away from the point of impact (strike the Newton comment made above) and I was bell-ring and bleeding profusely. I didn't have to look to know there were stitches in my future, even though the gaper closed nicely with a little pressure and one of my daughter's Barbie band-aids. After enjoying one of my wife's yummy Indian dinners, I made my way to the emergency room. A surprisingly short time after arriving, a doctor was manhandling the tender part of my forehead.

"It was healing nicely. I probably could have glued it together if I hadn't started messing with it. (HeeHee)"

 

I hate medical humor. The saving grace was a nurse who deduced my seasoned status and, as I was leaving, clandestinely handed me the tools needed to remove the stitches myself, commenting that I look like a "handy sort of a guy".

 

 

[Cairns]

For all you

 

Since mouse brains have many of the same regions as human brains, the researchers expect the same memory mechanisms would apply to us as well.

 

 

 

 

 

Let me know when they get mice to have total recall. No, no, just let me know when they have mice that remember baseball statistics.

[AlpineK]

My earliest memory comes from the age of 1 1/2. It was winter and snowy in my parents yard. My dad had found me a pair of skis and boots. He got me all set up in the yard and gave me a push.

 

I remember that but not much else from that time.

[ivan]

what's more memorable - the trip where you lost your fingers or the trip where you DIDN'T lose all your fingers?

[EWolfe]

Because, as I have been quoted as saying: "Some trips you never fully come back from"

Gosh E did you ever think that private message would become so famous? It is an instant classic. Maybe you should write more?

 

Thanks, Wayne. Much appreciated.

[Raindawg]

Because, as I have been quoted as saying: "Some trips you never fully come back from"

Gosh E did you ever think that private message would become so famous? It is an instant classic. Maybe you should write more?

 

Thanks, Wayne. Much appreciated.

 

I've never quite come back from meeting this guy in the airport last year:

 

My nose still itches!

[Stefan]

more stress = PTSD.

 

maybe that is why PTSD happens to military fighters more often.

[marylou]

I'm wide awake and all itchy because the Percocet is peaking. It's not stressful, just kind of annoying. I guess it's better than living through the 'night pain' associated with surgery.

 

Hopefully I won't remember it tomorrow.