On Emotional Resonance

In my forthcoming book, Life Before Birth, I write about resonance; that is, how current events and feelings resonate with earlier imprinted memories to merge and consolidate, giving the memory an inordinate force. This drives behavior, often out of our control, and produces symptoms that seem intransigent. I have surmised that the connection of present and past is arranged through similar or same frequencies or oscillations. It is that which bundles feelings into a single category.

Now there is more evidence for resonance. (“How Brain Gives Special Resonance to Emotional Memories.” Florin Dolcos, Kevin LaBar, Roberto Cabeza. Neuron. June 10, 2004) “The study provides clear evidence from humans that the brain's emotional center, called the amygdala, interacts with memory-related brain regions during the formation of emotional memories, perhaps to give such memories their indelible emotional resonance.”

In their experiments the researchers were seeking evidence for the "modulation hypothesis," which holds that the brain's emotional and memory centers interact during the formation of emotional memories.” (Also see Science Daily, April, 2009)

"The basic idea was simple: to find evidence supporting the notion that the brain's emotional region modulates activity in the memory regions to form an emotional memory,"

My point is: an event is registered at the highest level of brain function possible. So at four months of gestation, trauma will be registered at the brainstem level. There will be a neural highway of this event with various detours sending this information upward and forward informing higher levels about what is happening lower down; each level making a contribution in its own idiosyncratic language to the entire feeling. So here we have resonance; information traveling upward and forward, and later information traveling downward to resonate with the original event.

A short technical note: According to a study by C.L. Lowery, et al., sensory fibers proliferate at 20 weeks of gestation. Thalamo-cortical projections mature at about 29 weeks, although the thalamus seems to be operational at around 20 weeks. The thalamus is the switchboard that relays information to the inchoate neocortex which is just getting organized and also delivers information down to the feeling centers such as the amygdala. Lowery and his team point out that “Evidence for the subconscious incorporation of pain into neurological development and plasticity is incontrovertible.” [1] That important statement supports a position I have held for many decades; the unconscious is not a dark, evil place but rather, something that is inhabited by imprinted events very early in our lives that endure. We never really knew how early.

I am positing the assumption that low level imprints have a distinct signature in terms of frequency. It may be that each level recognizes a relationship with one another in terms of a similar frequency. So that something we endured doing womb-life, a mother heavily depressed and perhaps taking antidepressants, sends up through her nerve tracks nonverbal memories which then merge into what we undergo currently. That combined force then makes any reaction inappropriate. The problem thus far is that we have neglected deep brain imprints, focusing on knowable events and believing that the current situation is the one to concentrate on, when in reality it is but a fraction of the problem. I emphasize that my assumption is not fact. However, Mirecea Steriade has been researching this point for years. I would like to quote Steriade extensively but the work and explanation are so complicated that it would be meaningless to the lay reader, and often to me, as a matter of fact. He was from Bucharest and died in 2006. But he wrote about reciprocal connections between separate brain sites that seem to oscillate in terms of the same rhythms. Specifically, he traced the thalamus and the neocortex, and found “excitability changes consisting of depolarizing responses and decreased inhibitory responses.”[2] One can read many of his articles on oscillations. The point is that many brain structures are linked by reciprocal connections. And it may be that frequency oscillations is one aspect. What I believe may happen is that through this there is a consolidation of the various brain sites. And in terms of resonance it would be mean that later feelings are automatically joined with earlier but similar feelings. They are, in short, “consolidated.”



[1] “Neuro-developmental Changes of Fetal Pain.” Semin. Perinatol. Oct. 31, 2007, Pgs. 275-82.



[2] “Coherent oscillations and short-term plasticity in corticothalamic networks.” Research News. Vol. 22 No, 8. 1999 page 337.