Laugh And Cry Your Way To Memory Improvement

How To Use Your Emotions To Memorize More Instead Of Letting Them Take Over Your Life And Make A Big Fat Mess Of Everything   You're an emotional person, aren't you? Those uncontrollable feelings well up from time to time, perhaps even taking over the show. In other words, emotions replace the you that you know with someone quite different. At least, that's one way of looking at it. Emotions are different versions of ourselves. The self that becomes overwhelmed by laughter is different than the self who drowns in sorrow and misery. But then eventually you find your way back. You become you once again.   The Only Problem Is That You Don't Become You!     Strong emotional states change you, and I'll bet you remember at least a couple of times that you've been changed so strongly by an emotional state that you've had no means of going back. You're as chemically changed as toast is to bread. The question is, to what extent is this change due to memory? Has the experience of emotion changed you as such, or does it impact your memory so much that you literally remember to be a different person. Certainly, post traumatic stress disorder provides some examples of people affected by memories so strongly that constant recall of the traumatic event causes that new version of the person to hold fast. But that state does have to be renewed. Even if the person feels that the memories are coming back of their own accord, they must at some level be participating in the reconstruction. And such events don't mean that trauma has improved memory in that instant so much so that the person remembers everything in sparkling detail. Traumatic memory in no way ensures accuracy and it can also lead to the repression of memory.   The Return Of The Repressed   Repression and suppression of memory is really intense because it is essentially an attempt to obliterate memories from the mind. But as Sigmund Freud made himself famous for saying, what we repress returns, usually in the form of a monster. Post-Freud, we have some interesting research about the suppression of memory. For example, test subjects asked to repress feelings of disgust while watching a horror movie remembered far less about the story and with much less accuracy than those not asked to repress their feelings. And plane crash survivors who remain calm have been said to remember more than people overwhelmed by hysterics. I've experienced this memory effect myself following a near miss trying to land in Toronto. I was going there from New York to sit for a field exam when the plane suddenly pulled up and circled over the city. We late learned that another plane had still been on the runway ahead of us, and thank goodness the pilot pulled us out of there in time enough to avoid a fiery collision. Although I didn't go crazy in terms of screaming or crying out, my inner life went nuts, something that affected my memory for days and days after. While sitting for the exam, for the first time I felt a real disruption in accessing my Memory Palaces and mnemonics. All the more so because one person on the committee was in the warpath and doing her best to see me fail. But luckily, I had relaxation on my side and calmed myself. I reminded myself of the combined power of memory and relaxation and without suppressing or repressing the feelings of terror I remembered from the previous days's adventure in the sky, I managed to handle that remembered stress and the current stress at the same time. And this is interesting because I could have broken down into tears or hysterics in that examination room because I was so fragile. But according to some theories,