Brain On Fire — Susannah Cahalan
All we know is that they occur when the brain perceives on outward snsation—vision, sound, or touch— but there is no corresponding external source; it is a failure to distinguish between what is external and what is internal, referred to as self-monitoring theory.
In the same vein, it is precisely because these hallucinations are self-generated that they are so believable and vividly remembered, explained psychology professor Dr. Philip Harvey. It’s called the generation effect: “Because those hallucinations were self-generated,” Dr. Harvey told me, “you were better able to remember them.”
Although people with schizophrenia exhibit cognitive and memory defects, they can remember just as well as healthy people if they are forced to structure the memory themselves. For example, those with schizophrenia best remember lists of worsts when they are asked to make a story out of the words rather than straightforward and unaided remembering.
Couple this with the fact that these head trips were intensely emotional and would therefore be tagged as important by the hippocampus and amygdala, both of which were affected by my disease. The amygdala, an almond-shaped structure situated atop the hippocampus, located at the sides of the head above the ears in the temporal lobes, is a structure intimately involved in emotion and memory, helping to choose which memories should be kept and which should be discarded, based on which events have traumatized or excited us. The hippocampus tags the memory with context (the hospital room and the purple lady, for example), and the amygdala provides the emotion (fear, excitement, and pain).
When the amygdala stamps the experience with high emotional value, it’s more likely to be preserved, a process called encoding, and evenutally made into a memory, called consolidation. The hippocampus and amygdala help encode and consolidate the experience, or make it into a memory that can be retrieved later. When any part of this elaborate system is compromised, the memory not be formed.
...”When people think about a past event, they can incorporate new information in their recollection, making a new memory,” explained psychologist Elizabeth Loftus. Dr. Loftus has spent a lifetime working on the assumption that memory is often inaccurate.Â
A team of New York-based neuroscientists in 2000 demonstrated this assumption in lab rats testing to see if memories are constantly altered each time we recall them. The team uncovered another step in the memory process, called reconsolidation: when a memory is recalled, it’s essentially remade, allowing new (and sometimes wrong) information to filter in. This is normally useful because we need to be able to update or past experiences to reflect present information, but it sometimes creates devious inaccuracies.
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