Quite the Imagination

An interesting idea sparked during a listen to my favorite radio/news/talk show. The conversation was on a phenomenon called mis-remembering. That's not the proper name, but good enough for a discussion about experiential datas and how our brains process it.

Mis-remembering is when the brain strongly identifies with a story and imprints a memory about it.  It reminds me of telling those big childhood stories, when our parents would say, you've got quite an imagination!

It turns out that we have. This researcher brought a bunch of people together with a CatScan machine and one by one put a listener inside and registered how the brain responded when listening to the re-telling of a dramatic or traumatic event. She was able to isolate which part of the brain was active for passive listeners, and ways we listen and identify with the story.

Some listeners were passive, as she expected. It was an interested but detatched listening, with empathy and other emotions as they followed along. But she discovered some were so involved with the story that their brain activity actually created its own fresh memory from the story, as though they experienced the event themselves. 

This kind of research begs to be linked to the ongoing debate about exposure to violence in all of its forms, and the spike in violence and fantasy mass murders. We have too many examples of those who act out internal stress disorders from people whose lives were not full of violence and brutality.

If anyone's random brain can hard-wire the experience of violence, murder, brutality and gore into their active memory, how can we not hold the entertainment industry accountable?