How Brain Memory Works

Your memory is your mental movie. Your history and your past are stored and organized in your brain. Actions that you have performed and events that affected you were imprinted and encoded inside your brain.

The mental pictures of bygone age surface when you are triggered by someone or something and even your inner talks which you are unconscious of. You then recall a particular person, period or subject and go through a particular previous event associated with your present, all over again. Most times the pictures are so vivid like they are actually happening again.

Everyone has good and bad memories. How and what you recall makes the difference in your experience, feelings and behavior. Your present experience, if left to chance, is an extension of your past. Your current problems are related to the association of past painful memories into your present life. How you remember your childhood could have led you to behave in a certain manner in your adult life.

A large part of your now experiences depend on the pictures and meanings you have stored in your brain. And you live a life between the past and the future.

When you recall the past the way it happened, you will re-experience the event with the same feelings and response. This is because in recalling and reproducing the same mental picture, you will have the same psychological response as with the actual event or situation. When you immersed yourself back into a past emotional response, you will re-live the experience exactly at the time it actually happened.

Re-accessing it by changing the contents will help you remove your bad memories. You can consciously direct your brain to forget an event or person because you do not want to go back and re-experience a particular state if it makes you feel bad.

Deleting negative memories may seem far-fetched. But editing it is possible and within your control. You can edit a memory by removing the emotion attached to it. Or you could reframe the movie and create a new meaning to it.

When you see a picture from the past, do you see yourself in it? If you DON'T, you are still associating yourself with the event. You will tend to have the same emotions as you did then. One of the other methods is to consciously detach from it. Disassociate from the mental pictures.

In other words, deliberately step inside your mental picture. Put yourself inside it and watch the event from where you are now. When you can see yourself in it, you can observe it as an outsider.

It is useful to keep your loving memories and pleasant experiences. But there is no point in keeping intensely unpleasant experience and allowing it to have control over your future. The other method is to mentally push the picture further, remove the colors or turn off any audible sound. The original emotion will change and you will create a new meaning and that will affect your present. Without the emotions, the memory carries with it a different meaning.

Break the bonds of the past and go beyond your memories in order to move forward. Make a different choice and loosen yourself from being trapped to your history and start new patterns of thinking.

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