EFFECTS OF EMOTION AND AROUSAL ON MEMORY PROCESSING BY THE BRAIN

All living systems are dependent on information from the past. While this information may in part be inherent and genetically coded, there was through evolution a steadily growing increase of flexible and individual-specific information encoding, storage, and retrieval. In mammals, and especially man, this biological tendency resulted in a largely environment-stimulated access to information most essential for survival of the individual and the species. Consequently, the remembrance of emotionally and motivationally flavored events was of greatest importance. The apparent result of this is that there is a substantial overlap of those brain structures implicated in the processing of emotional, motivational, and memory processes, a conclusion obvious from the roles attributed to the Papez circuit. How interwoven arousal, attention, mood, and affect are, can most directly be deduced from the assessment of brain damaged patients. Examples from cases with memory disturbances in whom mood and affect influence memorizing as well as some hypotheses on the possible or likely interaction of mood and memory are given.