How was the memory of the events of September 11, 2001 formed and stored in our brain? What role do emotions play in the storage of our memories? How do positive and negative experiences influence the shaping of our personality?

These are some of the questions addressed in the fourth video of the series"The secrets of your brain", a project of the University of Navarra that brings together the latest advances in Neuroscience on the functioning of our brain, prepared by the Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Natalia López Moratalla; Carlos Bernar, specialist in Audiovisual Communication at the academic center; and Enrique Sueiro, PhD in Biomedical Communication.

According to Professor López Moratalla, fortunately we do not store everything that happens around us in the report . However, if the intensity of the stimulus is strong, that experience is fixed and stored for a long time deadline: "Moreover, emotions give preference to some memories, filtering the report. In other words, the more sensitive we are to an experience, the more we increase the amount of memorized details and the sensation of reality".

In the case of 9/11, the new video, graduate "Adolescent brain, report andcreativity", sample how some people for whom it was a great impact unconsciously changed their perception of what happened. After a few days, many of them mixed what they experienced, what they heard, or what they saw on television, so that when they recalled it, they recreated what happened and this was rewritten in the report according to the state of mind of that moment.

Natalia López Moratalla adds that for the memory of 9/11 "our brain had to use four different report networks: perceptual, semantic, emotional, and episodic. All memories are intertwined with each other and make the report a multiple system of dynamic networks that associate the various facets of the memory".

Positive memories resist the passage of time

The lived, and also the known, are shaping the autobiographical report itself, which begins to be forged in adolescence: "Positive memories resist the passage of time better and participate intensely in the construction of the personality because we rely on them to weave our identity, and to define the coherence of what we choose and what we aspire to," explains the professor.

On the other hand, disappointments or the emotional impact of traumatic events, always more intense in women, "fragment" the emotional report producing changes in the brain. "In fact, traumas break the networks of report by pruning the branches of neurons," she explains.

In conclusion, the researcher from the University of Navarra reminds us that report guides us in the present. It is a fundamental ingredient of thought, creativity and projection into the future. Therefore, she concludes, it is up to each person whether the report is a deposit of more or less useful data , or an inner world full of pleasure in living, the pleasure of knowing, and in which one is not a stranger to oneself.

Among the sources used to elaborate the fourth video in the series "The secrets of your brain" are articles from scientific journals such as the prestigious Mente y Cerebro (Mind and Brain).

This video, finally, continues the previous one in the series, graduate "Teenage brain: between liking and disappearing", which explains the gradual process of brain maturation from puberty to youth, governed by female or male hormones, with the differences that this entails in the maturation of boys and girls.