Last time we looked at how filicide can be interpreted as both good and evil, just by changing the names from Jack and Danny Torrance to Abraham and Isaac. In contrast to religion, science sees Jack and Abraham to be as insane as David Berkowitz, the serial killer dubbed the Son of Sam after claiming his killing spree was in obedience to commands from his neighbor’s dog, Sam. And to transform Berkowitz from Jack into Abraham like water into wine, all we need is the right story, a will to "believe, "and another 4000 years.
Thanks to a man with memory problems, we now know how turning a serial killing psychopath into a religious saint reflects the dualistic nature of memory. Since memorizing scriptures is one way to prove oneself worthy of salvation, religion would have colored that man more as a witch or pawn of the devil. Yet, by enlightening us about how memory really works, he shed some light on how great sins can become holy sacraments of obedience with enough time.
The unfortunate victim of a botched lobotomy, he was only known by the initials H. M. during his lifetime. Lucky for us, that botch revealed how the brain divides up responsibility for memories into two distinctive types: implicit and explicit. Information we remember unconsciously and effortlessly (like how to ride a bike) is our procedural/implicit memory (IM), while information we consciously work to remember (such as recalling items on your to-do list) is our declarative/explicit memory (EM).
Both EM and IM play important roles in how we recall information and interact in our environment, but an important difference between the two is relates directly to how they are affected by religious practices. EM comes in two forms: episodic, like events from our life, and semantic, like memories of facts, concepts, names, and other general knowledge. IM is unconscious and, with repetition, becomes automatic. Learning a skill and mastering a task uses IM to prime us to respond the same way to similar stimuli, which are often dependent upon context clues.
But here’s the difference. EM relies on language and conscious recall, while IM is nonverbal and unconscious. Language is part of our pre-frontal cortex, or PFC, while IM lives more in our nervous system and amygdala. Part of our executive function, the PFC helps with planning, decision making, working memory, personality expression, moderating social behavior. It enables us to differentiate among conflicting thoughts, determine good and bad, better and best, same and different, future consequences of current activities, and social "control.”
Unlike EM, IM has a tendency to focus on negative memories. Patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) often have an IM bias, leading them to unconsciously retrieve negative memories more than healthy controls. This bias can be explained by the fact that MDD patients have negative-biased representations of themselves, such as feelings of failure, loss, and worthlessness. Teaching a child they are a born sinner who must demonstrate they are worthy of salvation through their devotion to a brand of religious “faith” has the same effect, and dwells in our IM like an invisible hand.
Dual Memory
Like a computer system, our two memory systems operate in the form of narrative recall, which we sometimes ritualize into time honored traditions, and the other we re-experience, sometimes in the form of trauma. The former are the stories we tell ourselves that color our perception and seed our subconscious with confirmation bias. The latter lives in the neural circuits that allow our bodies to register whether an environment is safe or dangerous, otherwise known as neuroception. Unlike perception, which delivers cognitive insights in the form of thoughts and sensory data, neuroception occurs outside of conscious thought. One is stored in conscious EM, the other in IM, in our body, and expressed as changes in our biological stress response.
Like waterways within ecosystems, our nervous systems work in close relationship to other systems in our bodies, to other people’s bodies, and to our environments. Like the gas pedal and brake, we normally flow between nervous system states of sympathetic agitation and parasympathetic rest. Most of what our nervous systems do operates beyond conscious will, like gravity. But trauma causes us to experience the world with “a different nervous system,” one where our two memory systems end up at odds with each other.
In 1890, William James explained how trauma divides our memory systems, resulting in two forms of consciousness running simultaneously, like a computer program running on top of an operating system. “It must be admitted.” James said, that “the total possible consciousness may be split into parts which coexist, but mutually ignore each other, and share the knowledge between them.” This “split” results in dissociation that Bessel Van der Kolk said “prevents the trauma from becoming integrated within the conglomerated, ever shifted stores of autobiographical memory, in essence creating a dual memory.” In the normal memory system, elements of each experience are integrated into a continuous flow of experience. In the trauma memory system, thoughts, emotions, and sensations are stored as fragments.
Although ordinarily an active and constructive process, in those with PTSD, failure of narrative memory may lead to organization of the trauma on a somatosensory level (as visual images or physical sensations) that is relatively impervious to change. The difference is like Alfred Hitchcock’s film, Psycho. The parts of the film that develop the story line are like narrative memory, while the camera jumping rapidly at various angles during the violence of the shower scene are like the fragmented nature of trauma memory. The inability of people with PTSD to integrate traumatic experiences and their tendency, instead, to continuously relive the past, are mirrored physiologically and hormonally in the misinterpretation of innocuous stimuli (non-Christians) as potential threats (to salvation). This occurs in the form of embodied flashbacks.
Embodied flashback is an example of IM. Among other things, IM conditions us to associate one thing with another through simultaneous pairing, like a bell and food in the case of Pavlov’s dog and a shower with a butcher knife in the case of Hitchcock’s film. And in the case of infants and small toddlers, it is the only type of memory that exists before we have words. Being pre-verbal is why childhood trauma, which operates within us like an invisible hand, is different from adult trauma.
It is not that our rational mind is absent, but that it is like the police who show up after the crime has been committed, and are left to piece together a story of what happened in the aftermath.
Dueling Memories: The Hatfield Hippo vs the Army Ant McCoys
Think of your two modes of memory as the hippo and the army ants.
The hippo is for hippocampus, a horseshoe-shaped structure located roughly in the middle of our heads. It encodes and transmits long-term memories. Because it only develops its full connections around the age of seven, we can’t (explicitly) remember anything about infancy. From birth to two or three, however, it is already stockpiling long-term memories, but lacks the pathways needed to move them out of emotional storage. What makes it a hippo is how those memories make us hungry for a good story.
Our amygdala (and nervous system) operates like army ants. Under our skin, we feel them all over our body. An almond-shaped structure located next to the hippocampus, it comes fully wired at birth and plays a key role in detecting and responding to threats.
In adults, the hippo regulates the army ants like a sluice controls the impacts of a flood. When we encounter a possible threat, the former gives us access to long-term memories that can modulate the latter’s response. For example, to our amygdala, a dog barking triggers a startle response and a desire to flee. But our hippocampus recalls dogs we like, perhaps from childhood. This context allows you to override our startled response. Instead of running away, we reach out to pet the dog instead.
Psychologist Louis Cozolino explains that because the amygdala is fully “online” at birth, but the hippocampus is not, we are essentially wired to embody negative experiences in very early childhood. In other words, we are born wired to fight because we can’t yet flee, let alone rationalize or recall fond memories, because fleeing helps us survive
An important study concerning IMs revealed a startling finding about how religious practices affect our brains. Conducted in 2015 by Dr. Andrew B. Newberg, the study dealt with altered states of mind during intense Islamic prayer. Such practices, Newberg discovered, accompanied decreased cerebral blood flow to the prefrontal cortex and related frontal lobe structures of the brain. The prefrontal cortex is traditionally thought to be involved in executive control, or willful behavior, as well as decision-making. So, the researchers hypothesize, it would make sense that a practice that centers on relinquishing control would result in decreased activity in this brain area.
Because IM tends to focus on the negative while EM focuses on story, teaching a child to believe they are a born sinner trains their EM to look at a crucifix through a story of love and forgiveness, while their IM registers the terror of far worse tortures to come if they fail to obey the brand of "God" placed before them like David Berkowitz obeyed his neighbor’s dog. The story version of our EM is Abraham, while the emotional version of our IM is Jack Torrance. And as love grows for the former, the anxiety generated by the latter is then transferred onto one "witch" and "infidel" or another.
Next time, we’ll look more closely at this process, and at how religion uses this traumatizing process to inflict a moral injury on a defenseless child’s mind, in order to addict them to a dopamine attachment to a particular brand of the word “God,” Pavlovian style.
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