Before if you didn’t remember the color of the snake that killed your friend Randy, it meant you could be next. It improves your odds of survival. Nowadays we don’t have as many deadly encounters so our brain applies it to other stuff.
I remember reading somewhere that the brain keeps the painful memories vivid so that you can’t repeat them again. To expand more if you are going to make a decision the brain first looks for the bad memories attached to that decision before going to the good ones if the bad ones dont exist. Hope that helps.
There’s more survival advantage to remembering mistakes, dangers, illnesses, and close calls, because that helps you avoid them in the future.
Even losing social standing could be very dangerous to your last million years of ancestors. We’re social animals that lived in small tight knit groups, getting banished or labelled untrustworthy could be a death sentence or lead to a much harder life on the outside. So remembering something cringe that you did is literally a survival advantage (or at least it was, in the environment that we evolved for). Remembering cringe is more useful for survival than the memory of something good, so bad things stick in our memory, as red flags for the future.
It’s a survival trait. You want distinct memories of the times you almost died so that you don’t put yourself in those situations again. Almost fell off a cliff? Remember it so you don’t walk to close to the cliff. Your friend Jeff got mauled by a bear? Stay away from bears. Etc.
It’s called negativity bias; biologically, you form much stronger associations with stressful, dangerous, or scary things to help you avoid those things in the future.
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Before if you didn’t remember the color of the snake that killed your friend Randy, it meant you could be next. It improves your odds of survival. Nowadays we don’t have as many deadly encounters so our brain applies it to other stuff.
They offer more protection from an evolutionary point of view.
I remember reading somewhere that the brain keeps the painful memories vivid so that you can’t repeat them again. To expand more if you are going to make a decision the brain first looks for the bad memories attached to that decision before going to the good ones if the bad ones dont exist. Hope that helps.
There’s more survival advantage to remembering mistakes, dangers, illnesses, and close calls, because that helps you avoid them in the future.
Even losing social standing could be very dangerous to your last million years of ancestors. We’re social animals that lived in small tight knit groups, getting banished or labelled untrustworthy could be a death sentence or lead to a much harder life on the outside. So remembering something cringe that you did is literally a survival advantage (or at least it was, in the environment that we evolved for). Remembering cringe is more useful for survival than the memory of something good, so bad things stick in our memory, as red flags for the future.
Evolutionarily speaking, it’s probably so you have a better chance or not repeating whatever caused that painful memory
Your five. You shouldn’t have enough memories to ask this question. Now go play with your toys.
Memories are often lessons that we learn and are necessary for our survival.
A painful memory like an injury or the death of a family member or friends is a constant reminder for us to not suffer the same fate.
It’s a survival trait. You want distinct memories of the times you almost died so that you don’t put yourself in those situations again. Almost fell off a cliff? Remember it so you don’t walk to close to the cliff. Your friend Jeff got mauled by a bear? Stay away from bears. Etc.
It’s called negativity bias; biologically, you form much stronger associations with stressful, dangerous, or scary things to help you avoid those things in the future.