They’re called “involuntary memories”.
Do you ever do that thing when you're just walking along and suddenly you remember something embarrassing you did in 1998?
If you're anything like me, you will do. Recently I was walking down the cheese aisle at Waitrose and had a sudden flashback to a time I sneezed when our school photo was being taken and a gobbet of snot flew over three rows of heads down onto Alice Watkins' neck, in front of our entire year.
The 17-year-old memory made me physically cringe and swear out loud, and I got some funny looks.
BBC / Via vimeo.com
And they're very normal. Dr Jennifer Wild, a clinical psychologist at the Oxford Centre for Anxiety Disorders and Trauma, told BuzzFeed that almost everyone gets them.
"For a while, after a trauma or an embarrassing event, most people have these memories," she says. "Some will get a lot." It could be a month or so of regular flashbacks. Some people get more, some people get less, a few get none at all.
Via hijacked.com.au
"Your brain retains the information about the traumatic event, and the feelings associated with it," says Prof Chris Brewin of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. It's a sort of punishment/reward system, he says, and it's doing an important job: "It reminds people of important experiences – of danger or humiliation", to stop you from doing the same thing again.
You learn by associating experiences with outcomes. This is classic psychology, going back to the great Russian pioneer Ivan Pavlov, who used to ring a bell before feeding his dogs. Eventually the dogs began salivating in expectation of food just at the sound of the bell.
The same thing happens in traumatic or socially embarrassing memories. Your brain brings back the unpleasant sensations – the fear or the shame – when it finds itself in a situation similar to the original event. And with traumatic or embarrassing memories, says Dr Wild, the effect is pronounced. "In these situations, we get pumped full of adrenaline, and that heightens our awareness. That makes memories more vivid, and then when something later reminds you of that situation, it can bring the memories back."
They can be triggered by an external stimulus – for instance, says Dr Wild, it could be that a particular shade of cheddar yellow in the Waitrose cheese aisle reminded me of something that was present on that fateful day in 1998. Or could be internal – some way you're feeling, or simply your train of thought.
Via cheaperthantherapy.wordpress.com
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