This continues from the last post.
I found the best brain science book - 1 - a review of Brain View (1)
3. Emotion, experience, patterns
Emotion is a tool for survival. So why do we have memory?
Memory is a tool for survival too. We go through all sorts of experiences, hold on to the ones useful for survival, and pull them back up when we land in a similar spot later.
When I was a kid I put my hand into a campfire. (I wanted the potatoes roasting in it.)
It was hot and it hurt. I still remember the pain. So I’m careful with hot things now and I will be from here on. In the same way, I once got stuck holding a junk coin I’d bought. That one still stings. I haven’t looked at crypto since. Experience becomes memory, and memory shapes behavior.
The book explains it like this.
When the brain faces a situation that calls for a decision, it recognizes the unconscious rules and models stored in the brain from past situations very much like it. (140p)
So an experience gets stored as a pattern. In my case, I touched a campfire and it hurt. The campfire abstracts into hot things, and the hand abstracts into the whole body. What’s left is a pattern: don’t touch hot things. Sometimes a memory like this reaches all the way into the unconscious. Someone who got a stomachache from tomatoes as a child still feels queasy at tomatoes as an adult. The body filed the taste of tomato as a pattern.
You can’t remember all 24 hours of what you go through in a day. So which experiences should stay? I found the answer in a column on the science of learning. (The power of emotion drives learning and immersion https://21erick.org/column/11346/ )
Emotion drives attention, and attention drives learning and memory. Emotion decides which stimulus gets attention, and what gets learned and remembered (Kovalik, 2009)
We remember the experiences we felt something during.
To put it together: the patterns stored in memory get called up in similar situations and steer what we do. A useful pattern we’d call wisdom, or insight. A harmful one that holds us back we’d call trauma, or a bad habit. Either way, the pattern in your head works unconsciously. It moves you whether you notice or not, whether you want it to or not. And behind it sits emotion, and the interpretation of emotion.
The body is 70% water, the mind is 70% emotion
We run into a lot of people and things in a day. We read a lot online and talk a lot on KakaoTalk. But not all of it stays. Some experiences settle deep in the mind.
Shocking ones do. So do the ones where we felt something strongly, anger or joy or curiosity.
When an experience stays with us because we felt something, we call it a ‘meaningful experience’. Meaningful means you felt something. Meaning is emotion. Where the feeling goes, the meaning is. Which means that if you can make someone feel something in a situation, you can change what they do.
So exactly which emotion, set off how, changes what a person does?
The details are in the next post.
The limbic system: three ways to make money - a review of the brain science book Brain View (3)
P.S. The sequel, 뇌 마케팅의 비밀을 풀다, overlaps a lot, so there’s no need to read it.
P.P.S. We can change ourselves. The emotion we felt decides what we’ll do next. So change the emotion you’re going to feel and you can change yourself. My burn, for instance, can be abstracted more than one way. Chewing the memory over later, I might decide the real problem wasn’t the fire but camping. Then I’d be careful about camping instead of fire. What actually happened doesn’t change. But the interpretation, the abstraction, can. Change the interpretation and my behavior changes. Pick a different abstraction and you can change yourself.
A memory abstracted like this can be called a story, a narrative. Experience and pattern are stored around emotion, and a story is a container for emotion in the same way. I’ll get further into this when I cover stories. (Books to look at: Kindra Hall’s 히든 스토리, El Ouassil’s Erzählende Affen, Jordan Peterson’s Maps of Meaning)