Dr. Matt Walker

Could you get a dissipation in the emotional reaction?

And here we decided to throw a second ingredient into the equation, not just simply looking at your emotional reactivity, but we wanted to look at emotional memory.

Now, in a previous episode, we've spoken a lot about sleep and memory, but there we were speaking about

really quite neutral memory, textbook like memory, fact-based memory.

Emotional memory is very different.

And if I were to ask you, Andrew, cast your mind back to some of your earliest childhood memories or your team memories, and if anyone listening were to do that, my guess is that almost all of the memories that you recall are memories of an emotional nature, positive or negative.

Why is that?

It's because one of the functions of emotions when it comes to memory is to red flag and prioritize that experience, that memory as being salient because it's emotional.

And that instructs the brain that this information in particular

is very relevant to us as an organism.

Why?

Because the rest of the brain is shouting at me, this is emotional.

So there is something very privileged and very special about an emotional memory, like a red flag that tags it for priority in the brain.

But something I started to notice when I would read the data, both the neural data and the subjective data on emotional memory,

led me to get very interested in what happens with emotional memories over time.

Because what you will hear is that if I were to ask you, you know, recall an emotional memory, just try to remember it.

My guess is that now at the time of recollection, much later on, you are not having the same regurgitation of the same visceral emotional reaction that you had at the time of the experience.

What that sort of turned a light bulb moment on for me was that somewhere between the initial experience and the later recollection of that emotional memory, the brain has done a very clever trick.

It has divorced the emotion from the memory.

So now when you come to recollect that emotional memory, let's say days later or even months later,