Memory Archives - Farther to Go!

Neuroplasticity: Changing Your Neurochemistry

June 4, 2024 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

No matter the type or the scope involved, all transformational change requires changing brains. Personal transformational change requires changing your brain or my brain. Transformational change in an interpersonal relationship requires changing both parties’ brains. And social or global transformational change requires changing many brains. There is no way around it.

The primary driver of change in your brain is your behavior. —Lara Boyd, neuroscientist, physical therapist

Fortunately, brains have what is called neuroplasticity, so they CAN be changed. On the other hand, changing brains is difficult. It requires a great deal of repetition and perseverance—aka action—often over an extended period of time. It also requires commitment and a strong—or juicy—desired outcome. This is why although transformational change is possible, it isn’t probable.

The fact that transformational change is difficult isn’t a design flaw. But whether you consider the difficulty to be bad news or simply a challenge, it’s what’s so. There’s no way around that, either.

There are different kinds of neuroplasticity and different aspects to communication within the brain, such as the size and excitability or responsiveness of various parts of the brain, the connectivity between different parts of the brain, and the extent to which we use various networks, like the functional brain networks, within the brain.

You can’t change connectivity or the size or excitability of a particular part of the brain immediately. Other than in cases of injury, that requires time and repetition. You can’t permanently alter your neurochemistry immediately, either, but you can and do affect your neurochemistry in the here and now—and your neurochemistry can and does affect you—all the time.

In the video below, Lara Boyd does a great job of explaining the three kinds of neuroplasticity and how they relate to memory and learning. What do memory and learning have to do with creating transformational change? Everything! Creating transformational change requires training your brain just as learning does. There’s very little difference between the two processes.

As Boyd points out, chemical changes—which involve neurotransmitters (neurochemicals)—can take place immediately, but those changes are not long-lasting. You have to repeat the behavior if you want to make the changes more permanent. Here’s an example of how that works.

Endorphins* are neurotransmitters that, among other things, improve mood and wellbeing. One of the activities that can generate the release of endorphins is physical exercise, which is something I include every day. I generally experience a noticeable burst of endorphins after I’ve engaged in intense or moderately intense physical activity. If this level of intensity is infrequent, then I only get the short-term effect of endorphins. But if I engage in it frequently—and regularly—the experience of improved mood and sense of wellbeing remains pretty consistent, by which I mean it doesn’t diminish in between periods of exercise.

My brain has learned that exercise results in a better mood and greater wellbeing, which it interprets as a reward, and I remember the great feeling I get after finishing a workout. Both of those factors—learning and memory—increase the likelihood that I will keep engaging in the activity.

Since my brain likes the experience of exercise that’s intense enough to release endorphins, it wants that experience. Endorphins are one of the so-called liking neurochemicals. Dopamine is the wanting neurochemical, and it’s what I’ll talk about in the next post. As we go along, we’ll be looking at how liking and wanting neurochemicals help us either maintain the status quo or create transformational change.

Don’t forget to watch the video!

*Endorphins are your body’s natural pain relievers, moderating your perception of pain and also helping to reduce stress and improve mood and wellbeing. They are released when your body feels pain or stress and essentially block nerve cells that receive pain signals. Beta-endorphins have a stronger effect than morphine on your body. In addition, they’re released during pleasurable activities such as exercise, massage, eating and sex too.

This post is part of a series on neurotransmitters that both affect our behavior and are affected by our behavior.

Storying: It’s a Lot Like Breathing

July 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying.

Your unconscious (System 1) monitors and manages your physical functions such as alertness, arousal, breathing, circulation, and digestion. Actions you take, including many of the lifestyle choices you make—as well as the circumstances of your life—can affect these functions.

You can consciously attend to some of them—breathing, for example—some of the time. But you can’t attend to any of them all the time. And you can’t consciously control them because you don’t have enough System 2 bandwidth to handle the job.

In addition to maintaining homeostasis by managing physical functions, System 1 also manages things like your sensory perceptions, your awareness of being located in space and time, your immediate reactions to events, and the vast majority of choices you make each day.

You can consciously attend to some of these functions, too, some of the time. But you can’t prevent System 1 from managing your mental processes and your real-time reactions any more than you can prevent it from managing physical functions. Although you might wish to have more say, moment-to-moment, it’s good that you don’t.

Storying Is Automatic.

One of the mental activities System 1 regularly engages in is weaving your experiences into coherent stories. I call this storying, because there doesn’t seem to be a better word to describe it. Storytelling and narrating both describe relating a story in some manner: either something that already happened or something that is—or is being—made up. Your brain is neither relating a factual account of past or present events, nor is it fabricating your stories out of thin air. Editing may be a more accurate term, but that implies the preexistence of a story to be edited.

The process of storying includes interpreting events and experiences as they occur for meaning and relevance, deciding which details are worth remembering, adding or subtracting for effect and coherence, reorganizing sequences, if necessary, and incorporating the resulting story into your ongoing life story based on your current beliefs and model of the world. Your brain is so good at this and does it with such speed that you aren’t even aware it’s happening.

Just as breathing is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop breathing, storying is automatic, and you can’t decide to stop storying. (Your brain is you, so you are storying, whether or not you’re conscious of doing it.)

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

But just as you can consciously focus your attention on your breathing to calm yourself or remind yourself to be present, you can consciously focus your attention on your brain’s storying, at least from time to time. You can learn to be skeptical of the stories your brain spins. You can allow for the possibility that your stories are often interpretations, explanations, rationalizations, and justifications. No matter how satisfying, they are not true, not fact, not an accurate reflection of reality. Your unconscious may be more or less biased than another person’s unconscious, but everyone is biased to one extent or another.

We are the great masterworks of our own storytelling minds—figments of our own imaginations. We think of ourselves as very stable and real. But our memories constrain our self-creation less than we think, and they are constantly being distorted by our hopes and dreams. Until the day we die, we are living the story of our lives. And, like a novel in process, our life stories are always changing and evolving, being edited, rewritten, and embellished by an unreliable narrator. We are, in large part, our personal stories. And those stories are more truthy than true. —Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal

Storying doesn’t just help you make sense of your own world; it also helps you make sense of the rest of the world. And you’re not the only person storying. Everyone else is doing it, too. Consider the implications.

What’s New, Pussycat?
Novelty and Your Brain

May 2, 2018 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Are you curious and adventurous, constantly looking for new sensations and experiences? Do you tend to get bored easily? Are you quick to lose your temper? Extravagant or impulsive? Do you make decisions before you have all the information? Take risks? Enjoy being in the middle of chaos or disorder? Maybe a bit of an adrenaline junkie?

If you answer yes to most of those questions, you’re probably a neophiliac, but don’t be surprised if you’ve never heard of the term (which has nothing to do with dead people, by the way). Neophiliacs are people who not only enjoy novelty, they actively seek it out—sometimes going to extremes to experience it.

Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Early research into the novelty-seeking personality trait found it to be associated with conditions like attention deficit disorder and antisocial behaviors such as alcoholism, drug abuse, compulsive spending, and various other risky, unsafe, and illegal activities. So from that perspective, novelty-seeking is definitely not good.

But more recent research suggests that novelty-seeking actually keeps people healthy and happy and may even be the quintessential human survival skill* that helps us adapt to and cope with changes of all kinds and degrees. So now novelty-seeking is viewed in a much more positive light.

But trying to classify novelty-seeking as either good or bad doesn’t make a lot of sense. Since its reputation has improved, many people who should know better have been advising us to make a point of including more novelty in our lives by, for example, taking a different route to work. If your life is so lacking in novelty that taking a different route to work is the only way you can get it, you may have bigger problems to worry about.

Does Your Brain Like Novelty?

The fact that your brain responds to novelty doesn’t necessarily mean it likes it. Your brain pays attention to new things because it has to figure out what they are, whether they’re potentially pleasurable or harmful, and what you need to do about them. Novelty wakes up your brain’s reward system, which is involved in learning and memory, and the amygdala, which processes emotional information.

So you become more alert, aware, and emotionally aroused. Because dopamine has been activated, you are motivated to explore the situation in search of a reward. But the purpose of this amped up state is not to make you feel good; it’s to ensure your survival. It uses making you feel good to help you remember what you did and what you learned.

Is It Actually Novelty You’re Seeking?

The real question is: Do you tend to seek novelty for its own sake or is what you’re seeking providing you with novelty?

There’s a purpose for your brain’s response to novelty. When you encounter it in the course of doing or learning something new, undertaking a challenge, or accomplishing a goal, what you experience has relevance to your life. So focusing your attention on it and remembering it is meaningful.

Simulated or vicarious novelty may be pleasurable and emotionally arousing in the moment, but it’s superficial—a replica of the real thing.

If you’re up to something, you’re bound to encounter plenty of novelty along your path. And when you do, it will enhance your cognition and your experience, it will increase your well-being, and it will motivate you to do and be and want and contribute more. That’s one of the best aspects of being human. And that is good!

*Winifred Gallagher, New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change

Answers to the Memory Quiz

September 15, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Here are the answers to yesterday’s Memory Quiz. It’s important to bear in mind that no one is immune from widespread memory distortions. We integrate things that really happened with things that are generally true. The only way you can confirm whether or not a memory is true is to obtain corroborating evidence. In many cases, that isn’t possible; so you can rarely have complete certainty.

The more confident you feel about a memory, the more likely it is to be factual.
False
Confidence is a feeling. Your level of confidence bears no direct relationship to the accuracy of your memory. You can feel as confident about a false memory as you do about a real one.
–
False memories are rare occurrences.
False
False memories are not uncommon. They can be induced intentionally or accidentally. We all have them, so when someone claims a false memory as a true one, we shouldn’t automatically assume that person is lying.
–
You remember the things that have a strong emotional component.
True
Strong emotion—positive or negative—is one of the criteria your brain uses to decide that something is worth storing in long-term memory.
–
The more details you recall, the more likely it is that a particular memory is accurate and/or true.
False
The amount of detail associated with a memory is unrelated to its accuracy. A false memory can have a great amount of detail associated with it. Your brain can’t tell the difference.
–
The more often you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to alter it.
True
Every time you recall a memory, you put it into a “plastic” state, thereby exposing it to disruption and alteration. You reconstruct it when recalling it and again when storing it.
–
Something you’re really interested in is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory than something you’re not interested in.
True
You can remember all kinds of things that might be inconsequential to other people (sports statistics, song lyrics, movie plots, your grades) if those things are important to you.
–
You tend to recall so-called flashbulb memories—extremely vivid, powerful, and significant memories—with greater accuracy.
False
You may believe you have greater recall of flashbulb memories—that they’re somehow indelibly imprinted in your brain—but lots and lots of evidence indicates that the details you recall about such incidents are no more accurate than the details you recall about anything else.
–
The best way to get accurate information from people is to ask them open-ended questions.
True
If you ask people closed—or leading—questions (What color was her hair? or Wasn’t she a brunette?) you’re more likely to get incorrect answers. So it’s best to ask fewer questions and allow people to relate the story in their own way.
–
A confession is a reliable indication of culpability because people rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit.
False
There are numerous examples demonstrating that the techniques used by law enforcement to induce confessions are very successful in getting people to not only confess to crimes they didn’t commit, but also to come to believe they did, in fact, commit them.
–
When you try to suppress a specific memory, you’re likely to develop other memory deficits that seem unrelated.
True
The system for targeting memory suppression has been described as “kind of dumb.” When you try to suppress a particular memory, you’re likely to end up suppressing associated memories, too.
–
Your recollection of a memory can be influenced and altered based on the circumstances you’re in when you recall it.
True
Where you are, who you’re with, how you feel, the state of your mood (and mind), how long ago the event occurred—all of those things and many more can affect your recollection of your memory. We also edit our memories, without being aware we’re doing so, to reflect our current beliefs and biases.
–
Eyewitness testimony is reliable.
False
Eyewitness testimony is reliably unreliable for many reasons. For one, if you’re the eyewitness, the memory of the event is part of your autobiographical memory and subject to all the same distortions. For another, what you recall will be, in part, determined by the questions you’re asked and the way they’re asked.
–
You don’t remember much from before the age of three because your brain hadn’t yet learned how to encode long-term memories.
True
It isn’t until around age seven that concepts critical to the storage of long-term memories (including using a calendar, understanding the days of the week and seasons, and developing a sense of self) have been learned.
–
You have equal recall of the beginnings, middles, and endings of what you remember.
False
You have better recall of beginnings and endings—especially of endings—than you do of what happened in the middle. You’re likely to base your feelings about an event on how it ended.
–
There is no evidence for repressed memory.
True
The idea behind the concept of repressed memory is that traumatic memories are automatically banished to the unconscious and “forgotten.” But the reality is that, with some exceptions, traumatic memories are more likely to be remembered than to be forgotten because remembering them is important to our survival.
–
Mindfulness meditation may make you more susceptible to developing false memories.
True
Mindfulness can lead to confusion about the source of a memory: did it actually happen to you or did you imagine it happening? Misattributing the source of a memory is the basis for the development of false memories.

How did you do?

Take the Memory Quiz

September 14, 2016 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

Here’s a quiz you can take to find out how much you know about making and accessing memories. Daniel Schacter, author of The Seven Sins of Memory, contends that the problems we experience with memory are “by-products” of adaptive and useful aspects of the human mind. If we can better understand how memory works and what its purpose is, we can better appreciate the process of memory-making. That might help us avoid getting into arguments with other people based on whose memories are right and whose are wrong. To a great extent, they’re all wrong.

Check in tomorrow for the answers.

The more confident you feel about a memory, the more likely it is to be factual. [–] True [–] False
–
False memories are rare occurrences. [–] True [–] False
–
You remember the things that have a strong emotional component. [–] True [–] False
–
The more details you recall, the more likely it is that a particular memory is accurate and/or true. [–] True [–] False
–
The more often you recall a memory, the more opportunities you have to alter it. [–] True [–] False
–
Something you’re really interested in is more likely to be stored in your long-term memory than something you’re not interested in. [–] True [–] False
–
You tend to recall so-called flashbulb memories—extremely vivid, powerful, and significant memories—with greater accuracy. [–] True
[–] False
–
The best way to get accurate information from people is to ask them open-ended questions. [–] True [–] False
–
A confession is a reliable indication of culpability because people rarely confess to crimes they didn’t commit.[–] True [–] False
–
When you try to suppress a specific memory, you’re likely to develop other memory deficits that seem unrelated. [–] True [–] False
–
Your recollection of a memory can be influenced and altered based on the circumstances you’re in when you recall it. [–] True [–] False
–
Eyewitness testimony is reliable. [–] True [–] False
–
You don’t remember much from before the age of three because your brain hadn’t yet learned how to encode long-term memories. [–] True [–] False
–
You have equal recall of the beginnings, middles, and endings of what you remember. [–] True [–] False
–
There is no evidence for repressed memory. [–] True [–] False
–
Mindfulness meditation may make you more susceptible to developing false memories. [–] True [–] False

Storying Is Automatic.

There’s No Such Thing as a True Story.

Is That a Good Thing or a Bad Thing?

Does Your Brain Like Novelty?

Is It Actually Novelty You’re Seeking?

Contact Me