Some of the words they were asked to remember or forget were related to traumatic memories (e.g. Participants in both groups were directly asked either to remember a particular word or to forget it. They studied a group of 14 women who had been sexually abused as children and compared them with a control group. Professor Richard McNally and colleagues from Harvard University wanted to find out whether long-term memory could be effectively repressed by trauma sufferers using a ‘directed forgetting’ procedure: essentially just telling people to forget ( McNally et al., 1998). Of course being able to repress long-term memory would provide some relief for sufferers, but is it possible? The trauma continues to resurface, again and again, from long-term memory despite attempts at thought management or repression. Long-term memory and PTSDįor those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), images and long-term memory of a traumatic event become an intrusive and sometimes unbearable part of everyday experience.
While the persistence of memory can be vital to our survival, at the same time it can leave us haunted by past events we might rather forget.Īs in surrealist Salvador Dali’s most famous painting, ‘ The Persistence of Memory‘, memories can weigh heavily on our minds thoughts, like ants, scurrying: endlessly searching for who knows what. Persistence is the most polarised in its effect on us ( Schacter, 1999). The fact that long-term memories persist, though, puts it on the list of Daniel L. Living in a comfortable modern society may mean a person has relatively few real life-threatening dangers to face on a regular basis.īut when people are exposed to more precarious environments, making the same mistake twice can be disastrous. Our very survival relies on the fact that we remember when bad consequences follow from particular situations. It is easy to see the positive, adaptive nature of memory’s persistence. The list is potentially endless because long-term memories encompass everything stored in our mind for later retrieval and even things we cannot retrieve but are stored there anyway.
Remembering an important day, such as a birthday or holiday.
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