In chapter five of McGaugh we are presented with a greater articulation of the concept of “flashbulb memory” developed by Roger Brown and James Kulik. Flashbulb memory, as the word “flashbulb” would seem to suggest, is not photographic and does not provide accurate or complete memories necessarily. Flashbulb memory seems to be an umbrella term for strong, semantic memories that stem from an intense emotional experience, one that can be referred to in a more or less concise way. They are vivid and clear in the sense that whatever happened to structure these memories contained intense emotional content. This idea seems to be the most significant in the relationship between memory and emotion throughout our readings for this week because, as most of the data presented in LeDoux, McGaugh and the LaBar and Cabeza article suggests, the process to determine what we remember, how we remember it, and what physically and psychologically happens in the event and the progression following it, is tied to an emotional arousal occurring during or after a significant experience.
I found McGaugh’s study of the use of drugs on this effect to be very interesting and simultaneously confusing. He studied the use of stimulants, adrenalin boosters, and beta-blockers in lab rats to determine if said drugs affected the memory process. What he found was that the stimulants did increase the ability to learn and memorize and that the beta-blockers had the opposite effect. Further in his research, he also found a direct relation to the use of these drugs in the amygdala and the hippocampus supporting his claim that the emotional impact on memory is also significant. McGaugh also suggested that applying this data to humans would prove effective, i.e. giving beta-blockers to patients admitted into the ER after experiencing a traumatic event (like a car crash) might suppress, to some extent, post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) because the process of remembering would be stifled. While this is an interesting claim, I couldn’t help but think about the previous distinction of memory versus learning/performance. We haven’t yet begun to figure out the complexity of what exactly makes up a memory (in humans or animals) therefore the exaggeration or repression of them (within a specific episode) seems unlikely at this point and time. It seems kind of obvious to me that stress hormones would increase an awareness of an event that would lead to a more detailed memory, but how would this process turn out in a study of long term memory? More significantly, how would this process relate to flashbulb memory in a study where participants had to be administered the drug immediately after experiencing a significantly stressful event? How would you calculate this?
Another point that I found interesting in the readings was McGaugh’s reference to remembering as a “creative act” (p. 115). How we remember and what we remember ties to our creative processes because of our nature, as humans, to be storytellers. This kind of relates to our discussion last week of mnemonics, yet the inherent process to develop stories and believe them as truths is interesting in relation to our discussion of integrated/non-integrated memory. I often find that certain memories I feel that I had were really memories of my sister’s, who, being a great storyteller, would present her experiences in such a vivid way that I would visualize them and interpret them as my own at a very early age. This is similar to Sir Frederic Bartlett’s idea that we sometimes include coherence in our narrative tellings of events in sacrifice of accuracy. It also ties to the study we read about in McGaugh to convince children that they got lost in a supermarket and consequently provide them with a false memory.
Another idea that is not necessarily related to this, but I found interesting seeing that its kind of similar to gestalt psychology, is LaBar and Cabeza’s use of the term “central gist” in describing emotionally arousing experiences. By this I think they mean the general emotional content of a remembered experience as opposed to specific details. I would really like to see this point developed more in understanding how we might fuse emotional memories, or construct details out of a “central gist” as opposed to the actual details in an event.
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Although I see how the use of drugs in both the enhancement and repression in some cases of memory consolidation could be seen as a good thing, upon reading McGaugh I was somewhat appalled at the implications. In the very beginning of chapter 4 he prefaces his discussion of the use of drugs by saying that "what we need is selectively (in italics) enhanced memories of our significant (in italics) experiences. Fortunatly...nature has figured out a way to enable our brains to achieve this for us" (pg. 59). If nature did this for us, than why would McGaugh suggest that we intervene, unnaturally, with people's memories by either enhancing the positive/pleasant and repressing the negative/traumatic? Doesn't this pose a serious moral/ethical dilemma? I understand the idea behind sparing war combatants the continual agony of reliving traumatic experiences, but doesn't giving them a suppressant drug seem like something a certain administration we are familiar with would come up with? Make the soldiers forget what happened?!
Furthermore, although we're talking about debilitating memories, don't people's memories, both good and bad, shape who they are as person? And also, people's memories of significant events contribute in a huge way to the making of history. If no one remembered the disastrous and horrific nature of, say, 9-11, would it go down in history as not being as serious or emotional an event?
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