Why We Remember for Such a Long Time

You know the brain is one of the rare places in the human system where there is a very small turnover of cells. The blood, bone and muscle cells turn over fairly rapidly so we get new cells every few weeks or months. No so with the brain whose cells last us a lifetime, which is why what happened to us during gestation and infancy has such a long lifespan. Yes, there are a few places, such as the hippocampus, where we get new cells perhaps for a lifetime but that is the exception.

So trauma while we are being carried is imprinted into the very rapidly developing neurons and does its damage forevermore. Those long-lasting imprints are designed for survival; to warn us over and again about how to react in the case of similar adversity or threats later on. Those traumas stimulate the production of stress hormones affecting the nerve cells and change memory and learning. They form the “epigenetic mass” which changes how the genes are expressed. We learn how to react from all that. It is adaptive, not an aberration. That is, deviation, neurosis, in my terms, help survival. The early traumas enhance some parts of memory and help them endure; that is one function of the stress hormones. They change the structure and function of some nerve cells. Think of this as a lesson in evolution and how and why it takes place: Experience produces the kinds of cells that are needed to react to that experience. Experience changes us neuro-biologially. Our whole system changes in order to adapt to life. And when that life is traumatic and loveless we change accordingly; we become neurotic (what I call that change). We deviate physically and emotionally in order to adapt and survive. Neurosis is adaptive, which is why we should not mess with it, our compulsions and obsessions until we understand the basis of it all. It is the feeling centers, such as the hippocampus that seals in those critical early memories and makes them last. One role of the stress hormones is to produce a kind of consolidation of key memories so that they remain in place to guide us and help us adapt, even in neurotic ways. We may do it to feel loved and to survive. This enhanced memory also takes place in the key feeling structure, now well explored, called the amygdala, which seems to swell a bit under the load of feeling.

We may have become intellectual to please parents who needed smart kids so that they would look good. And the kid’s physique suffers and changes in deference to the parents needs. The feeling centers diminish and there is less emotion to call on. The kid now lives in his head. Smart but emotionless. Not good.