So by narrowly focusing the memory network on the thing triggering the emotion, such as the gun from the previous example, your brain remembers details of the gun very accurately, but "at the expense of devoting any resources toward processing anything else that's going on," Kensinger said.Ĭonversely, events that we experience as emotionally positive, such as a wedding, or as neutral, such as an average day at work, don't trigger the brain to focus on any one specific detail, so "you're just going to kind of remember everything going on in an equally good fashion," Kensinger said. "But it seems like when we're having an emotional reaction, the emotional circuitry in the brain kind of turns on and enhances the processing in that typical memory network such that it works even more efficiently and even more effectively to allow us to learn and encode those aspects that are really relevant to the emotions that we're experiencing," Kensinger told LiveScience. Our brains have a specific memory network that kicks into gear whenever we are trying to remember something, Kensinger said. The reasons for these sharper memories may be rooted directly in the way our brains are wired. "It's clear that there are some aspects of events that are really well-preserved, and then people may completely forget other aspects of the event altogether," Kensinger said, adding that the phenomenon has been documented in research on eyewitness testimony. So, for example, if you are mugged, you may remember the gun pointed at you with a high level of detail because it is what caused your fear, but you may completely forget details that are peripheral, such as the things around you on the street or what your assailant was wearing. The details we are most likely to remember accurately are the things that directly cause our negative emotional reaction. While we might not remember more total details about a bad event we experience, "the details you remember about a negative event are more likely to be accurate," Kensinger explained. "It really does matter whether positive or negative in that most of the time, if not all of the time, negative events tend to be remembered in a more accurate fashion than positive events," Kensinger said.
Negative events may edge out positive ones in our memories, according to research by Kensinger and others.
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