Can the human mind actually delete unpleasant memories? It’s been months now and I still don’t know the exact answer I've been scouring away websites, skimming books to get a column related to this but all my efforts were in vain until today. I found this amazing article which was buried under a pile of beauty and lifestyle blogs.
Now how did this weirdly unique idea pop into my mind, well, it's all Karan, he made me watch a movie called Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and since then I couldn’t keep my hands off this topic. The climax of that movie took over my mind and made me think about my life, how I deleted some episodes, how I remember nothing about a specific period of my life. It might sound crazy but it isn’t fictional. The way vampires turn off their humanity, humans can turn off their memories.
My favorite psychologist of all time, Sigmund Freud,(no, not because of the Oedipus complex), discovered this phenomenon hundreds of years ago. Researchers are now working on this and trying to figure out if it is true and if it is how can technology assist this process. Science has done wonders in this field, numeorus therapies have been designed to make this memory suppression possible but we are still unknown to the reasons for natural memory suppression.
Digging deeper into this vast web of memory I found out that memory is basically an action of the brain in which it records, stores, and recalls information. The first step in memory creation is the recording of information into short-term memory. Researchers have known for several decades that this process of encoding new memories relies heavily on a small area of the brain called the hippocampus. It’s there that the vast majority of information you obtain throughout the day comes and goes, staying for less than a minute.
Sometimes though, our brain flags a particular piece of information as important and worthy of being transferred into long-term storage through a process called memory consolidation. It is widely recognized that emotion plays a major role in this process.
Memories are cue-dependent. They just stay somewhere in the back of our heads but come into action only when triggered.
Humans tend to suppress or substitute unhappy or embarrassing memories (nbcnews, 2012), because who wants to relive those painful days of misery and sorrow. Do we hide them so deep that we ourselves forget about them?
Yes, scientific methods can help us get over these memories and begin again, but we are enough, we can ourselves delete our traumas and haunting memories. I guess I did the same unintentionally I deleted some parts of my life and manipulated my mind to remember something else, something that never happened nor did I want that to happen.
On reading a lot about it I discovered that we can purposefully do that. We can delete away or actually suppress the memories of our toxic ex or childhood trauma by just using some simple tricks.
The ritual release isn’t a joke or fiction and it works. To do a ritual release, all you have to do is turn your memory into a mental snapshot and imagine that you are setting it on fire.
Trigger objects suck, removing them would lead to a huge tramp in the demolition of past memories. Certain objects or images may trigger a painful memory for us and make it harder to forget the memory. If you have any objects or pictures that trigger bad memories for you, then put them somewhere out of sight or consider getting rid of them.
Try thinking about unpleasant details while doing pleasant things. One way to overcome the bad feelings associated with memory is to teach ourselves to associate unpleasant memory with good things.Our goal is to make these painful memories less painful through positive association.
As they say, new things replace old ones so can be thought of in the case of memories. Another great way that you can get rid of old memories is to get out and form some new ones. Even if we are not doing things related to the memory we’d like to forget, forming new memories will push the things we want to forget out of the way.
You may be able to replace a memory that you want to forget by building new memories that are similar to the old ones. Try to seek out ways to experience positive things that are similar to the memory that you want to forget. After a while, your mind will start crossing its pathways and the original memory won’t be as strong. Maybe ignoring it for long will slowly kill it or the process of forgetting will take over you. This isn't a solution blog neither a you will get fine blog, it is just my dilemma
on paper.
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