Ciara Greene
speaker
121 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard May 2025
last heard May 2025
Ciara Greene’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So, you know, you can think about, if we think about, you know, how memories are formed in the brain, they're formed by synapses forming connections between different neurons. Okay, so we create these networks of of connections between different neurons in the brain. And some of those networks have lots and lots of connections to them.
So there's like lots and lots of roads or routes to that particular memory, lots of paths by which we can access it. But some of our memories are kind of, those networks are a little less dense and there are fewer connections to them. So we don't have as many kind of easy routes to them. So they're kind of less easily accessed in a lot of ways.
And that's kind of that feeling that sometimes we have where, you know, you're walking down a street and then something, it could be a smell or a sight or just something really small triggers a memory that you haven't thought of for years and years and years.
And that is, you know, it was some memory, some kind of something that was stored in such a way that it had relatively few connections to other parts of your memory. And then but then something you essentially accidentally found yourself on the road to that memory and you're retrieving it.
And so, you know, when we think about that kind of inside out idea of decluttering the memory in some ways, yeah, that that does happen to an extent that we are condensing down kind of the gist, you know, so out of all this list of US presidents, for example, which ones do I actually need to remember and which of them can I just collate into a list of there was a load of other guys who were probably all called Andrew, you know, so I think.
I could not tell you the names of more than about six U.S. presidents. So there's ways that we can condense down what's actually going to be really important here.
people on average tend to remember positive events more than negative events over time. We tend to kind of let a lot of the negative stuff go and keep a lot of the positive stuff.
So we'll tend to kind of remember that we got better grades when we were in school, or we'll tend to remember that we were more generous than we were, that we gave more money to charity, that we were more helpful to other people. And that we, you know, did things that, you know, will make us look good.
And there's some really nice work showing that it isn't just that we do this in a way that it makes us look good to other people. It's also that it makes us look good to ourselves. So, for example, there was a really nice study looking at grades where people were asked to remember their grades. But in this study, they knew that the researchers had access to their actual scores.
But even so, when people would kind of ask to retrieve, you know, what were your grades like? And people who had gotten A's would remember them really well. People who had gotten D's did not remember them well. They remember that they had gotten B's or C's, even though they knew, the researchers knew the real data.
So it wasn't a matter of, I'm going to kind of slightly smudge this because, you know, I know there's a reason why I didn't do well there, but they don't need to know. You know they know. So your memory is actually being distorted to make you feel like you were a better student than you were or you were more generous or kinder or whatever.
Yeah, exactly. And this is, I suppose, it's kind of slightly tied into that idea that, you know, everybody is a better than average driver. Nobody is thinking of themselves as being a terrible driver. Nobody is thinking of themselves as, you know, oh, I was really only ever just average. But of course, this varies with a number of different things.
So, for example, with people who have depression, that tends to be a little bit less the case. And one of the things that that we can think about when we think about how our emotion interacts with our memory is that if we think about how our memories are very associative. OK, so I talked earlier on about that idea of you're walking down the street and something triggers a memory.
A lot of our memory works in the same way in a lot of different contexts. And one of the things that's really interesting from an emotional context is that we tend to retrieve memories that are congruent with our current emotional state. So if I'm currently feeling very happy, I'm more likely to be able to remember events when I was happy.
If I'm feeling sad or depressed, I'm more likely to be able to retrieve memories from my life that are sad or depressing. And then what that will mean is that I'll have a kind of slightly skewed perspective of my life, that I'll tend to, you know, view my life as being glass half empty instead of glass half full.
Okay, so this idea that that's referred to as a schema that we have, we create these schemas, these sort of mental frameworks that we use to store lots of information in our memories. one model of depression is that depression is caused by a kind of a negative schema.
So essentially a way of seeing the world that tends to characterize things as very negative, both in the moment, but also in terms of how we were, the kinds of memories that we're retrieving. So somebody with depression might have more difficulty retrieving positive memories and will find that they keep drifting into thinking about the more negative side. And then
Because they'll do that, then we'll have another cognitive bias that will say, you know, OK, if I retrieve, let's say, six memories from my life and four of the memories that I retrieve are really sad ones, I must have had a really sad life.
And that may well be true, but it can also be influenced by the fact that that bias is leading you to retrieve those memories in the first place and then leading you to kind of over-interpret the frequency of those as being representative of your life as a whole.
Yes. So in this study, they had the participants read descriptions of a person. And the description would include both positive and negative things.
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