\u201cThere\u2019s this idea, with silence, that if we don\u2019t talk about something, it starts fading,\u201d says Charles B. Stone of Universit\u00e9 Catholique de Louvain in Belgium, an author of the paper. But that belief isn\u2019t necessarily backed up by empirical psychological research\u2014a lot of it comes from a Freudian belief that everyone has deep-seated issues we\u2019re repressing and ought to talk about. The real relationship between silence and memory is much more complicated, Stone says.<\/p>\n \u201cWe are trying to understand how people remember the past in a very basic way,\u201d Stone says. He cowrote the paper with Alin Coman of the University of Pittsburgh, Adam D. Brown of New York University, Jonathan Koppel of the University of Aarhus, and William Hirst of the New School for Social Research.<\/p>\n \u201cSilence is everywhere,\u201d Stone says. He and his coauthors divide silence about memories into several categories<\/strong>. You might not mention something you\u2019re thinking about on purpose\u2014or because it just doesn\u2019t come up in conversation. And some memories aren\u2019t talked about because they simply don\u2019t come to mind. Sometimes people actively try not to remember something.<\/strong><\/p>\n 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<\/strong>.\u00a0 Some silences are more likely to lead to forgetting than others.\u00a0 People have more trouble remembering silenced memories related to what they or others talk about than silenced memories unrelated to the topic at hand<\/strong>.\u00a0 \u00a0If 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.\u00a0 Rather he should talk about the build-up and avoid any discussion of WMDs.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n Or to supply another example of the subtle relation between memory and silence:\u00a0 If your mother is asking you about your boyfriend and you tell her about yesterday\u2019s date, while thinking\u2014but not talking\u2014about 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.<\/p>\n \u201cSilence has important implications for how we remember the past beyond just forgetting<\/strong>,\u201d Stone says. \u201cIn terms of memory, not all silence is equal<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Association for Psychological Science press release: People who suffer a traumatic experience often don\u2019t talk about it, and many forget it over time. But not talking about something… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,4],"tags":[12,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1059"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1060,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1059\/revisions\/1060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1059"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1059"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1059"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/images\/blogpics\/Memory.jpg\" "\\"memory\\"")
People who suffer a traumatic experience often don\u2019t talk about it, and many forget it over time. But not talking about something doesn\u2019t always mean you\u2019ll forget it<\/strong>; if you try to force yourself not to think about white bears, soon you\u2019ll be imagining polar bears doing the polka. A group of psychological scientists explore the relationship between silence and memories in a new paper published in Perspectives on Psychological Science<\/em>, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.<\/p>\n