A New Insight into Memory

I spent many years banging my head against the problem of organizational memory and why so many purported technology "solutions," particularly those that emerged during the heady days of the knowledge management craze, did so little to contribute to how large organizations could benefit collectively from the wealth of experiences derived from their work practices. Many of my thoughts were ultimately compiled into a massive Word document that currently sits on my desk as I try to figure out what to do with it (and one of the few things I did with my Yahoo! GeoCities site was to create a page with the abstract for this document and a link to its current version). I have even tried to get my mind around the latest results in biological models of memory, although readers of this blog have probably discovered by now that my understanding of memory is as much informed by Proust as by biology.

My biological interests were recently revived when the Reuters BlogBurst service brought my attention to a recent post on the Anxiety Insights blog. The post concerned an explanation for why emotionally charged events are not easily forgotten in terms of the chemical behavior of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine. It basically reports on a paper that has just been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America:

Tully K, Li Y, Tsvetkov E, Bolshakov VY. Norepinephrine enables the induction of associative long-term potentiation at thalamo-amygdala synapses PNAS 2007 Aug 20; doi:10.1073/pnas.0704621104 [Abstract]

The text of the paper, as quoted in the blog post, translates this rather unwieldy title into a more straightforward summary:

We previously demonstrated that the learning of fear is associated with increased synaptic transmission between neurons in the amygdala and brain regions, which provide information about sound to the amygdala. We found that norepinephrine facilitates this increased transmission.

The research leading to this conclusion was conducted in the interest of finding treatments for post-traumatic stress disorder (PSTD) and generalized anxiety disorder (GAD); and the paper concludes with the hope that, now that this particular chemical process has been identified, it can be treated through "certain manipulations of the adrenaline system." This could, of course, be a good-news/bad-news result that recalls a famous letter by Rainer Maria Rilke on why he decided to withdraw from psychotherapy:

If my devils are to leave me, I am afraid my angels will take flight as well.

On the other hand only the patient who has to deal with those "devils" of PSTD has the right to decide whether they should be expunged at the risk of losing the angels as well.

From my point of view, the interesting theoretical question now is whether similar chemical links exist for the more positive emotional associations, such as those unlocked by Proust's tasting that madeleine dipped in tea. There is also the way in which Proust's memories then all spilled out in narrative form, thus invoking my previously cited quotation "that what does not get structured narratively suffers loss in memory." The biological models for these mechanisms are still hidden from us, but it is still encouraging to read that research is continuing to expose that which had been previously concealed.