Students that are reading this post, and actually everyone that was a pupil at the past, can understand the big question - How can we make the brain remember better? In fact, how can we encode the information so the retrieval will be accurate?

Bad retrieval can be awkward, if you don’t remember your college name, or if you don’t know the answer in an exam. But it can be terrible, if you are a witness and you say wrong information!

Emotions affect are memory!

My intuition was that happiness makes people remember. When you are happy, dopamine is released. Dopamine is also the material that at time of learning and reward, transfer the information in the brain (neurotransmitter). Surprisingly, turns out that at time of happiness, or different positive emotions, we tend to be with “relational memory”. At this state, we create connections between bits of information, and we see the reality as holistic and global. So it increases creativity, but decreases memory!

When you are sad, different processes happen. Emotional enhancement of memory - EEM - is a phenomena that increases accurate memory. It make sense, because if something is making you sad, or angry, you want to remember exactly what is that thing and avoid it. EEM is increasing memory only for the specific item, but not to the context. For example, it is common that people who were robbed, report a lot of information about the weapon that the robber held, but they do not remember how the robber looks. It happens because the weapon caused emotional arousal, therefor EEM, so all the things that are not weapon, do not go through encoding.

To this point, the conclusion is that are memory is not prefect. Either we remember roughly, because we were happy, so we did not pay attention to details, or the opposite will happen: we remember only the details of the main item in a negative emotion situation. I’m sure you are thinking, hey, it’s not true. Sometimes I’m not happy and not sad, just hanging out, apathetic. And still I do not remember everything - I will be really happy to read your explanations for the for this forgetting.

How can you remember event that never happened?

An extremely interesting phenomenon is false memory. This is the name of one remembering something that didn’t happen to him, or at all. When we are sad, we form less false memories (about the main event - we don’t remember much about the context). Therefor, if you are afraid of remembering things that never happened, and of writing nonsense at the exam, keep sad. By the way, also too sad is not good for memory. People with clinical depression tend to form a lot of false memory - only for negative events. Maybe this is part of the depress loop.

On the other hand, like you realized, it is also good to be happy. Positive emotions help us to connect different type of information and build a deep understanding. So now tell me - which kind of memory problem do you prefer?

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References:
(sorted by the importance to this post)

• Storbeck, Justin, and Gerald L. Clore. "With sadness comes accuracy; with happiness, false memory: Mood and the false memory effect." Psychological Science 16.10 (2005): 785-791.‏

• Zoladz, Phillip R., et al. "Brief, pre-learning stress reduces false memory production and enhances true memory selectively in females." Physiology & behavior 128 (2014): 270-276

• Brainerd, C. J., Holliday, R. E., Reyna, V. F., Yang, Y., & Toglia, M. P. "Developmental reversals in false memory: Effects of emotional valence and arousal". Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, (2010). 107(2), 137-154.‏

• Pesta, Bryan J., Martin D. Murphy, and Raymond E. Sanders. "Are emotionally charged lures immune to false memory?." Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 27.2 (2001): 328.

• Joormann, Jutta, Bethany A. Teachman, and Ian H. Gotlib. "Sadder and less accurate? False memory for negative material in depression." Journal of Abnormal Psychology 118.2 (2009): 412.