Memory, Learning, and Emotions, Oh My!

This reading was a bit more difficult for me than the ones we’ve had previously. In fact, although she made some really great points, I thought that the title was very misleading. “Healing and the Brain” was not what a chunk of this piece was about. All I got was “brain, brain, emotion is more powerful than intellect, brain, and brain.” Yeah, she discusses healing in conjunction with some of the topics she brings about, but really doesn’t fully delve into the healing aspect, merely just skims over it and explores concepts of the brain. I understand we need that back history, but I feel like she could have shortened it and made the healing portion of her essay a lot clearer, because – and I hope I’m not the only one – I felt very lost at many points, not sure of what her argument was anymore or what she was trying to get at. The only place I saw her really start to get into healing where it made sense to me was towards the end, and then the essay just stops. She tries to tie it up nicely together and it just did not work for me at all, left me more confused, wondering if I was reading the right piece all along or not.

A few of the main themes I did receive, however, were that instead of seeing cognition and emotion as at odds with each other (do we think first and then act or is it reverse? Brand would argue that with recent evidence, our emotions act first), they actually work together. With our perception of sensory things or events, there’s a play between how they make us feel (amygdala) and how we interpret them (hippocampus). This brings me to one of my favorite quotes from the chapter which was, “Once our emotional system learns something, we may never let it completely go.” (209). In terms of traumatic events or sad experiences, this definitely is true. We may never be able to forget or move past from what happened, but we can take charge of it and learn from the experience that will benefit us in the end. Which brings me to her next argument on learning. You can’t have memory or learning without emotions. We can learn from our emotions, it changes the way we think and behave, and she leaves us with this notion that healing is a type of learning (or re-learning) which is definitely true. We are re-training our brain to think about the event in a different or new way that will help us instead of how it’s hurt us in the past, and you wouldn’t be able to accomplish that without emotions or memory and remembering.