© Psych Central
Emerging research questions the belief that if we do not talk about something, then we will forget the episode.
The issue is timely as experts look for new methods to help people recover after a traumatic experience.
"There's this idea, with silence, that if we don't talk about something, it starts fading," says Charles B. Stone, an author of a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Although this perspective has been widely accepted, researchers question this view saying that the belief is not supported by empirical psychological research - a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues that are repressed and need to be talked about.
The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone said.
"We are trying to understand how people remember the past in a very basic way," he said. "Silence is everywhere."
Stone and his coauthors divide silence about memories into several categories.
You might not mention something you're thinking about on purpose - or because it just doesn't come up in conversation. And some memories aren't talked about because they simply don't come to mind. Sometimes people actively try not to remember something.
One well-studied example used by Stone and his colleagues to demonstrate how subtle the effects of silence can be, establishes that silences about the past occurring within a conversation do not uniformly promote forgetting.
Some silences are more likely to lead to forgetting than others. People have more trouble remembering silenced memories related to what they or others talk about than silenced memories unrelated to the topic at hand.
If President Bush wanted the public to forget that weapons of mass destruction figured in the build-up to the Iraq War, he should not avoid talking about the war and its build-up. Rather he should talk about the build-up and avoid any discussion of WMDs.
And at a more personal level, when people talk to each other about the events of their lives, talking about happy memories may leave the unhappy memories unmentioned, but in the future, people may have more trouble remembering the unmentioned happy memories than the unmentioned sad memories.
Or to supply another example of the subtle relation between memory and silence: If your mother is asking you about your boyfriend and you tell her about yesterday's date, while thinking - but not talking - about the exciting ending of the date, that romantic finish may linger longer in your memory than if you just answered her questions without thinking about the later part of the evening.
In summary, the relationship between silence and memory is complex.
"Silence has important implications for how we remember the past beyond just forgetting," Stone said. "In terms of memory, not all silence is equal."
Source: Association for Psychological Science
I wonder what model of "memory" they are working with.
Memories reside in the mind. They are all available for contact. TO contact a memory, or communicate with it, is to BEGIN to remember it. But if that memory has pain, suffering, loss, or a programmed command to "go no further" or "stay out" or "go away" the being may refuse to continue to communicate with it. What the person says about the memory to someone else is a totally separate issue, depending on trust, social appropriateness, etc.
The process has stages. The first one is to locate a memory. Like an iceberg that is mostly underwater, only small bits of memories are exposed to help a person identify them. Locating memories is a whole ability in itself. For instance, most people can't locate anything past life. But that doesn't mean they aren't there.
The next stage involves beginning to take a look. This is done in particular with memories that are tagged as somehow dangerous. So this step takes some courage, some willingness to reach. If one is not very able in this area, one can develop the ability using items that are more real than memories, such as objects in the room, etc.
The last stage is to view the memory completely enough to accomplish whatever you were trying to do by locating it in the first place. Maybe you were just trying to recall a name or a date. In old-fashioned therapy methods, you had to pull up the entire memory and go over it several times until you had fully remembered it. In newer forms of therapy that is no longer necessary. But there are certainly portions of the incident that will need to be clearly viewed. This is therapeutic because there are aspects of the incident that might not have been well-understood at the time it happened. Examining a copy of the incident (a memory) at a later time can assist one to understand the incident more completely. This could be as simple as a word that was spoken that was misunderstood at the time.
Why won't the "experts" tell you all this?
Probably because they aren't really interested in people getting better.
Sad, but appears to be true.