Holy Rewired - "Broken Emotions" (part 2)

In the second part of this chapter, David Phillips writes about the role of emotions in our life and about emotional memory.

As seen in part one of this chapter, the brain has two main structures: the amygdala (emotional) and the neocortex (rational). "The emotional brain is key to assigning meaning to any experience...Those experiences create an emotional memory that is capable of influencing behavior without a person even realizing emotions are involved. This is because emotional memory is not a 'conscious recollection'...However, emotional memories, or implicit memories, form from memories of dangerous or threatening situations, and involve implicit or unconscious processes."

In discussing emotional memory, the author says that "there are multiple memory systems in the brain, each devoted to different functions...one memory system allows a person to learn to hit a baseball. Another system causes a person to remember trying to hit a baseball and not succeeding. Still another...will make that same person tense when he comes to the plate after having been hit in the head by the pitcher the last time he was at bat..."

A French physician (Edouard Claparede) examined a female patient who, because of brain damage, lost the ability to create new cognitive memories. So each time the doctor would enter her room, he had to introduce himself anew, even if he had just been there moments before. He attempted something different one day and entered the room, extended his hand to greet her and the woman reached out to shake his hand as she had done other times before. However, this time he had a tack hidden in the palm of his hand which pricked her and caused her to jerk her hand back immediately. From then on, although she still had no cognitive recollection of who he was when he would return, she would not shake his hand. She wasn't able to explain to him why she wouldn't, only that she would not shake his hand.

Claparede concluded two things from this: first, that learning is not completely dependent on conscious awareness (our experiences are teaching us whether we are aware that we are learning or retaining anything or not). And second, once learning has taken place, the stimulus doesn't have to be consciously known in order to generate an emotional response.

"Humans, therefore, have an implicit emotional system of memory interdependent from an explicit conscious memory. This is the emotional memory."

It appears to be the case that the emotional memory is less forgetful than the conscious or explicit memory is in the human brain. There are reasons for this: "...the explicit memory system is incredibly forgetful and inaccurate ...emotional events are often accompanied by selective amnesia of the experience"; in other words, the conscious memory of unpleasant events is often repressed. Also, while cognitive memory has the potential to distort or forget an event, "the emotional responses tend to diminish very little over time. They actually increase in intensity as time goes on...Years after an emotionally painful event, our reactions can be worse than right after the event."

Phillips suggests that we see the emotional impact in the first sin (Genesis 3). When the serpent approached Eve, he called her attention to the fruit of the garden by asking her a question and then he appealed to her emotions (delightful to look at and desirable). Her emotional response led to thinking about it which led to action. "After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, their first reaction was an emotional reaction. 'I was afraid,' Adam said, and out of this emotion, he and Eve created a covering for themselves. Then they hid, also an expression of the fear and shame they felt. That is the pattern: emotion, thought, and then action. To journey towards wholeness, then, we have to bring healing to our emotions."

James says something similar to this in James 1:14,15 "...each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death."