Everything we do involves neurons firing in our brains. Every single thing. And memory researchers, starting with Donald Hebb in 1949, have established the fact that “neurons that fire together wire together” which is to say that the more often we do an action or think a thought, the more likely it is that pattern of neurons will fire in that sequence again. That’s what “learning” IS: the reliable memory of some information or skill we’ve acquired. A memory is neurons reliably firing in a particular sequence. An analogy might help: picture a very overgrown field covered with high weeds and grasses and you have to cross it to get someplace you want to go. You bushwhack across with significant difficulty. If you cross that field by that route again soon, some of the grass is already bent over; if you cross it many times by that route you wear a path across the field and it gets easier and easier. It becomes highly likely you’ll take that path in the future. Neurons are like you: they like to take the fastest and easiest way possible. It’s unlikely you’ll do the work of creating a different path unless there’s a strong incentive to do so. (God often uses the pain of a valued relationship that’s not working well to create that incentive.)
It's commonly accepted that a habit we want to form can be established by 30 days of repetition. And a habit essentially is the mind guiding us to carry out a certain behavior without our having to consciously choose it every time. Why then would we question that if a child retreats to her room routinely after school most days, experiencing loneliness and painful thoughts about what a loser she is, a habit is formed of thinking that way? We can refer to that habit of thinking, feeling, and acting as a part of self. Doing so allows us to interact with those thoughts, feelings, and behavior tendencies in a direct and often useful way. (Once we personify it as a part of self with an age, we can say we “communicate with” that part of self.)
Next, we need to understand the role of the hippocampus in “digesting” experience into memories. You can think of this little structure in the middle of the brain as the air traffic controller dealing with all the incoming aircraft (information). When everything is calm, it simply sends the experience (the whole airplane) to a safe place to land. However, when a lot of stress chemicals are coursing through your torso and brain, the hippocampus can get overwhelmed and doesn’t do its job as well. It may send fragments of the experience (images, sensations, emotions, soundbite thoughts) to different runways and put them in different hangers, isolated from each other. And in situations of extreme stress, it can stop working altogether (the plane never lands) because in order survive something terrible, the person’s “attention” shifts to something on the periphery or totally different from what’s happening here and now in this moment. (This is what happens for some victims of assault or other horrifying tragedies. Their brain protects them by numbing out—one form of dissociating. In this situation of inescapable life-threat, the nervous system goes into what Stephen Porges calls “dorsal vagal shutdown” like an animal in the wild caught by a predator and doomed. More about this later.)
Next, we need to recognize that there are two different memory systems. The one we typically mean when we say “I remember X” is the explicit system which becomes functional by the time a toddler is three. It’s the system that lets us narrate what happened or what we learned in class, etc. In contrast, the implicit memory system is largely “behind the scenes” and happening without our conscious attention to it. It’s functioning in the third trimester of gestation, recording the sound of mom’s voice and taking in all kinds of emotional data from the starting gate at birth. A child’s mind is acquiring complicated “knowledge”, such as the language being spoken around her, without actively trying. That same mind is also acquiring knowledge about “the dance steps” in this or that relationship; how my relationship with mommy works is different from how my relationship with daddy works and from how my relationship with brother works. They couldn’t articulate it, but they’re learning “the rules” of what makes who happy and mad just as surely as they’re unconsciously learning the grammar of a native tongue. This kind of “procedural knowledge” about relationships remains unconscious until and unless life makes it necessary or useful to figure it out.
Many things that start out in explicit memory thanks to intentionally focusing on them quickly or over time slip into implicit memory without our even realizing it. This includes things like how to ride a bike or knit or do ballroom dancing. If we intentionally devote a lot of time to mastering the perfect tennis serve or the most efficient strokes for swimming, that procedural knowledge becomes part of us in ways we no longer have to consciously think about; we do it more or less automatically. What you may not have recognized is that when we spend a long time in a particular relational dance, “the moves” of that dance become automatic for us in a similar way. And through classical conditioning stimuli (triggers, cues, apps), we can start automatically “dancing” (thinking, feeling, acting) today with “a new person” as we did back then with the “earlier person.” Because of implicit memory, emotional learning stored behind the scenes can turn normal human experiences into signals of relational danger.
We tend to think of emotions as ‘just in our head’ like thoughts, but it doesn’t take much to recognize that emotions have physical and biochemical counterparts. We feel sadness in our chests (“heartache”) and we get “red in the face” with anger. Disgust can bring nausea or a gag response. Joy and happiness can make us lightheaded. Excitement makes our hearts race. You get the idea. So if our interactions with key people are routinely accompanied by fear, anger, or sadness and the bodily sensations of those emotions, later in life the experience of that emotion and its sensations may set off warning signals in your amygdala.Let’s say, for instance, that a child’s parent couldn’t tolerate exuberance and excitement in the child. Later on (hours, days, months, years), if his body has the physical sensations of excitement, his amygdala is likely to signal NOT SAFE. A normal human experience has become an internal trigger.
That’s probably enough to think about for now.
Next we’ll look at how the brain screens and compartmentalizes.
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