Theos-Talk Archives (January 2004 Message tt00137)

--- In theosophy_talks_truth@yahoogroups.com, "netemara888" 
<netemara888@y...> wrote:

Here is an article I just found. I am saying as a preface to it 
that if memories can be chemically induced to block themselves out 
in the brain, then they can be be induced to unblock memories.

These findings go along with a post I made 
recently about memory. That past life recall is based on the 
inscribing into the memory grooves extremely bad and good 
experiences. 

Now, this article says that people selectively forget or make 
themselves forget things in this life that are unpleasant. In so 
doing this memory still has not lost its ability to affect them, 
such as the case of post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Therefore the answer to spiritual evolution is not forgetting the 
bad stuff but in recalling all of it and putting it in new places. 
That is where this psychology is probably headed.  

It shows that if people can repress memories then they can also be 
excited and elicted and brought back to mind for further analysis. 
Especially those from the distant past. If you can completely forget 
much of this life's memory then imagine how much you have forgotten 
of the past ones.

Netemara

)))))))))))))))))))))
here's the article:

Public release date: 8-Jan-2004
[ Print This Article | Close This Window ]

Contact: Lisa Trei
lisatrei@s...
650-725-0224
Stanford University 

Research reveals brain has biological mechanism to block unwanted 
memories
For the first time, researchers at Stanford University and the 
University of Oregon have shown that a biological mechanism exists 
in the human brain to block unwanted memories. 
The findings, to be published Jan. 9 in the journal Science, 
reinforce Sigmund Freud's controversial century-old thesis about the 
existence of voluntary memory suppression. 

"The big news is that we've shown how the human brain blocks an 
unwanted memory, that there is such a mechanism and it has a 
biological basis," said Stanford psychology Professor John Gabrieli, 
a co-author of the paper titled "Neural Systems Underlying the 
Suppression of Unwanted Memories." "It gets you past the possibility 
that there's nothing in the brain that would suppress a memory – 
that it was all a misunderstood fiction." 

The experiment showed that people are capable of repeatedly blocking 
thoughts of experiences they don't want to remember until they can 
no longer retrieve the memory, even if they want to, Gabrieli 
explained. 

Michael Anderson, a psychology professor at the University of Oregon 
and the paper's lead author, conducted the experiment with Gabrieli 
and other researchers during a sabbatical at Stanford last year. 

"It's amazing to think that we've broken new ground on this … that 
there is a clear neurobiological basis for motivated forgetting," 
Anderson said. "Repression has been a vague and controversial 
construct for over a century, in part because it has been unclear 
how such a mechanism could be implemented in the brain. The study 
provides a clear model for how this occurs by grounding it firmly in 
an essential human ability – the ability to control behavior." 

In recent years, the question of repressed memory has attracted 
considerable public attention concerning cases involving childhood 
sexual abuse. "That was very controversial because it went through 
two pendulum swings," Gabrieli said. "The first swing was that 
people thought, 'What a horrible thing.' The second was that people 
said, 'How many of these might be false memories?' Then people 
started asking does repressed memory even exist, and can you show 
that experimentally or scientifically?" 

Anderson first revealed the existence of such a suppression 
mechanism in the brain in a 2001 paper published in Nature 
titled "Suppressing Unwanted Memories by Executive Control." He took 
the research a step further at Stanford by using brain imaging scans 
to identify the neural systems involved in actively suppressing 
memory. The core findings showed that controlling unwanted memories 
was associated with increased activation of the left and right 
frontal cortex (the part of the brain used to repress memory), which 
in turn led to reduced activation of the hippocampus (the part of 
the brain used to remember experiences). In addition, the 
researchers found that the more subjects activated their frontal 
cortex during the experiment, the better they were at suppressing 
unwanted memories. 

"For the first time we see some mechanism that could play a role in 
active forgetting," Gabrieli said. "That's where the greatest 
interest is in terms of practical applications regarding emotionally 
disturbing and traumatic experiences, and the toxic effect of 
repressing memory." The idea is that even though someone is able to 
block an unpleasant memory, Gabrieli said, "it's lurking in them 
somewhere, and it has consequences even though they don't know why 
in terms of their attitudes and relationships." 

The experiment 

Twenty-four people, aged 19 to 31, volunteered for the experiment. 
Participants were given 36 pairs of unrelated nouns, such as "ordeal-
roach," "steam-train" and "jaw-gum," and asked to remember them at 5-
second intervals. The subjects were tested on memorizing the word 
pairs until they got about three-quarters of them right – a process 
that took one or two tries, Anderson said. 

The participants then were tested while having their brains scanned 
using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) at Stanford's 
Lucas Center for Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. The researchers 
randomly divided the 36 word pairs into three sets of 12. In the 
first set, volunteers were asked to look at the first word in the 
pair (presented by itself) and recall and think about the second 
word. In the second set, volunteers were asked to look at the first 
word of the pair and not recall or think of the second word. The 
third set of 12 word pairs served as a baseline and was not used 
during the brain scanning part of the experiment. The subjects were 
given four seconds to look at the first word of each pair 16 times 
during a 30-minute period. 

After the scanning finished, the subjects were retested on all 36 
word pairs. The researchers found that the participants remembered 
fewer of the word pairs they had actively tried to not think of than 
the baseline pairs, even though they had not been exposed to the 
baseline group for a half-hour. 

"People's memory gets worse the more they try to avoid thinking 
about it," Anderson said. "If you consistently expose people to a 
reminder of a memory that they don't want to think about, and they 
try not to think about it, they actually don't remember it as well 
as memories where they were not presented with any reminders at 
all." 

Implications of the study 

Gabrieli said the findings contradict human intuition. "What's funny 
about that, from a psychological viewpoint, is that mostly people 
are quite the opposite in life – a very unpleasant thing intrudes 
into their thinking," he said. "They ruminate, it bothers them, and 
it comes up when they don't want to think about it. Mostly, if you 
say, 'Don't think about a pink elephant or a white bear,' people 
flash onto it immediately." 

Anderson likened the brain's ability to control memory to an 
individual's reflexive ability to halt an unwanted action. For 
example, Anderson recalled once standing at an open window and 
noticing a potted plant starting to fall. He quickly tried to catch 
the plant until he realized it was a cactus that could have injured 
him. "Our ability to stop action is so ubiquitous we don't know 
we're doing it," Anderson said. "This idea is that the 
neurobiological mechanism that we have evolved to control overt 
behavior might be recruited to control internal actions such as 
memory retrieval as well." 

Anderson said the findings about the brain's ability to suppress 
memory could be used as a tool to better understand addiction and 
the ability of people to suppress unwanted thoughts related to 
craving. It might also help provide a model to assess individuals at 
risk from suffering post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. 

In addition to Anderson and Gabrieli, the paper was written by Kevin 
N. Ochsner, a former Stanford postdoctoral fellow now at Columbia 
University; and other Stanford researchers including graduate 
student Brice Kuhl; social science research assistants Jeffrey 
Cooper and Elaine Robertson; science and engineering associate Susan 
W. Gabrieli; and radiology Professor Gary H. Glover. The research 
was supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental 
Health. 


###
-By Lisa Trei- 

News Service website:
http://www.stanford.edu/news/ 

Stanford Report (university newspaper):
http://news.stanford.edu 

Most recent news releases from Stanford:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/html/releases.html 

To change contact information for these news releases: news-
service@l... Phone: 650-723-2558. CONTACT: Lisa Trei, 
News Service: 650-725-0224, lisatrei@s... 

COMMENT: John D. E. Gabrieli, Department of Psychology, Stanford 
University: 650-725-2430, gabrieli@s... Michael C. Anderson, 
Department of Psychology, University of Oregon: 541-346-4796, 
mcanders@d... 

Relevant Web URLs:
http://gablab.stanford.edu/
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