Mind Walls & Memories
What are memories for?
Memories alert us to the presence of stimuli that have been experienced often enough to be tagged by our physiological system as important to us, including shapes, smells, food, companions, threats. This tagging is called encoding or encodement by neuroscientists.
Stimuli can be good, bad, or neutral. Apple pie can be good, bad, or neutral based on our experience with apple pies.
Think of all the experiences in your life that have been encoded as important and as good, bad, or neutral. This is autobiographical memory, those things that are the basis of your mind during engagement with the outside world. Your memory structure is your internal home.
What kinds of memories are there?
As mentioned, we encode autobiographical experiences: things that relate to us personally. We encode what is going on around us to some extent (I will explain memory’s limits in another post). This type of memory can be reported verbally and includes sights, sounds, events, thoughts, and autobiographical information. This is called episodic memory by psychologists. There is also cellular, muscle, endocrine, and immune memory (I will explain these very interesting forms of memory in other posts).
Can memories be erased?
Each type of memory must be disrupted in the cell or cell fields encoding it in order to erase it. Tissue destruction destroys memories (dementias of various types, stroke, traumatic brain injury). Some kinds of drugs disrupt memories. Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) destroys some parts of memories, but they often recur.
Can memories be controlled?
Mental blocks (walls) can be inserted in selected memory pathways to prevent propagation of that memory to the conscious mind. We do have conscious and unconscious mind compartments (yep, another post).
Purely mental memory creation. You can tell yourself something until it is encoded in your neural pathways. This ‘telling’ includes any kind of exercise and cognitive (thinking) practice (prayer, mantras, positive or negative scripts, playing a musical instrument, soccer, woodworking, automechanics, suturing, etc).
Purely mental memory creation takes the contents of all memories that can be recalled and compared and makes integrations of or discriminations between those that result in language and abstractions of all kinds (mathematics, religions, philosophy, the arts, etc.).
Selective attention-blocked categories keep any stimulus that might trigger a memory intended to be blocked from reaching the conscious mind. Metaphorically this is how we build walls in the memory pathways of our minds. Blocked stimuli cannot get into our conscious minds and will be unavailable for use in conscious operations like making decisions or making judgments. However, these stimuli are encoded in the unconscious portion of our minds. Stimuli that are repeatedly blocked have a high influence on the integration and discrimination operations ongoing in the unconscious mind (another post).
Why would we want to disrupt or ignore a stimulus-specific trigger?
PTSD. Various traumas experienced throughout life can result in post-traumatic stress disorders (PTSD) of various kinds. These can interfere with a balanced functional life. These can be disrupted pharmacologically (with drugs) or by integrating the memories into an explanatory context that makes sense of them such that they become learning experiences and sources of personal pride and functionality. Cognitive behavioral therapy developed over decades by clinical psychologists is one therapeutic mode that can help many forms of PTSD.
Grief. Sometimes when we lose a person or situation who or that was foundational to our mind, we experience that loss as destructive, and it is until we rebuild our minds. Sometimes disrupting our sense of safety and comfort with respect to what we lost is necessary to move forward. Often integration of the loss with our new situation is best. Thus we can integrate memories of the lost or disrupt them and subsequently build a new stable mental foundation.
Mind Control Via Memory Control. We have the power to control our own minds by selecting what memories and associated stimuli we allow into our conscious minds. This has allowed individuals and groups to survive in Earth Biome and among our respective cultures. Training in such is provided by the grandparent and parent generations to their children. There is much we learn to ignore and memories we learn to disrupt to fit into our particular family, community, and our larger culture.
Mind Walls. These absolutely disrupt the flow of stimuli to the conscious mind. This requires ignoring much of the contents of the unconscious mind which is always processing stimuli from the external and internal memory systems, integrating or discriminating among them and attempting to present items of importance to our conscious minds.
Take-away.
Memory is encoded in the cells and cell fields of our bodies. It is a foundational function of our embodied-minds that can be disrupted and controlled.
