What Is The Secret Of Safe Memories?

Last night I was tired but Neo was jumping all over me - out of the blue, I held him tight so that he cannot move and said, "Neo Locked"!

I have completely forgotten about this for years until last night that I used to do the same with Max during his puppyhood. When he wanted to play or go out, I would hold him tight and tease him "Max Locked",  he would make funny noises and try to get out of the hold. Eventually, I would let him win and he would jump all over me again. We used to play this game often but weirdly, I didn't remember about that until last night.

Stephan Hall in 2013, wrote about this ground-breaking research by Daniela Schiller which kind of explains why I forgot about that for years but it came back to me last night.

Schiller, 40, has been in the vanguard of a dramatic reassessment of how human memory works at the most fundamental level. Her current lab group at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, her former colleagues at New York University, and a growing army of like-minded researchers have marshaled a pile of data to argue that we can alter the emotional impact of a memory by adding new information to it or recalling it in a different context. This hypothesis challenges 100 years of neuroscience and overturns cultural touchstones from Marcel Proust to best-selling memoirs. It changes how we think about the permanence of memory and identity, and it suggests radical nonpharmacological approaches to treating pathologies like post-traumatic stress disorder, other fear-based anxiety disorders, and even addictive behaviors.

In a landmark 2010 paper in Nature, Schiller (then a postdoc at New York University) and her NYU colleagues, including Joseph E. LeDoux and Elizabeth A. Phelps, published the results of human experiments indicating that memories are reshaped and rewritten every time we recall an event. And, the research suggested, if mitigating information about a traumatic or unhappy event is introduced within a narrow window of opportunity after its recall—during the few hours it takes for the brain to rebuild the memory in the biological brick and mortar of molecules—the emotional experience of the memory can essentially be rewritten.

“When you affect emotional memory, you don’t affect the content,” Schiller explains. “You still remember perfectly. You just don’t have the emotional memory.”

I think, its established now that memories so precarious and constantly get rewritten but here is the irony regarding the "safest" memories (which is not common knowledge yet).

In Schiller’s view, then, the secret to preserving a memory doesn’t lie in protein synthesis in the synapses or the shuttling of neural traffic from the hippocampus to the exurbs of the brain. Rather, she believes, memory is best preserved in the form of a story that collects, distills, and fixes both the physical and the emotional details of an event. “The only way to freeze a memory,” she says, “is to put it in a story.” Which ultimately brings us back to her father.

When she first told the story about Holocaust Memorial Day at The Moth in 2010, Schiller speculated that the sirens functioned as what psychologists call a “conditioned stimulus”—a sensory cue, very much in the Pavlovian tradition, that triggered a painful memory. And in light of her work on reconsolidated memory, she began to think that by sitting at the kitchen table sipping his coffee, her father was rewriting his painful memories by associating them with a pleasant activity.

But even her personal story about memory, like memory itself, has begun to update itself. Last year, for the first time, Schiller’s father briefly spoke about his teenage years—about the selflessness of his mother and uncle in a time of great deprivation, and most of all about his close relationship with his younger sister, who perished in the Holocaust. Schiller now suspects that her father’s reluctance to recall those traumatic events is a way of protecting and preserving memories so beautiful that he wants never to rewrite them and risk losing their power.

Since then, they’ve reverted to their usual three-word conversations about the Holocaust. “Because they are so precious, these are memories you don’t want to change,” she says. “The safest memories are those you never remember.”

Even if Schiller's theory is partially true, then what happened to me was beautiful!

More than a decade ago, without any conscious effort on my side, the little playtimes I had with Max were tagged as "safe". My guess is because my positive emotions were at its peak, nature knew that was important to me. As the years went by, I "forgot" about it in order to keep the memories "safe" (and avoid being rewritten). It's just crazy to even think how our mind-body loop operates!

I hope, I have tons of memories of Max which I don't remember and I hope, it comes back when I least expect to bring a smile.

P.S:
I didn't remember about this research either but accidentally while searching this blog for Stephen Hall, I found this as well.