Question: How does the brain process emotions?

Alex Reid answered on 10 Nov 2018: last edited 10 Nov 2018 4:55 pm

Hi 742memp52 thanks for the question. As a sleep psychologist the level that I can best answer this question is related to sleep! I specifically look at memory consolidation in sleep, this is a series of processes that help prepare your memories for future behaviour. Emotion plays a very important role in this process. If you think about it both positive and negative emotions can help colour memory and tell you what is important to remember and pay attention to in the world. For example, if one of our ancestors saw their uncle get devoured by a massive sabre toothed tiger that would be a pretty horrible memory, but it would also be useful, because they would now know to avoid the area they last saw the giant death cat. The same goes for positive emotions, they would have told out ancestors things like where to get the best food and how to find the best mate. When you experience an emotion, particularly negative emotions, part of your brain called the amygdala lights up like a little christmas tree in terms of activity. This can help ‘tag’ memories as important. Later on in sleep, these memories might get priority in terms of consolidation (think of the fast track queue at Alton Towers). Interestingly there is evidence that sleep also dampens your emotional response to negative memories through consolidation. If you think of emotion as an orange peel, and the memory that it is linked to as the orange segments, sleep helps ‘unwrap’ the orange allowing our brains to focus on the information contained within. In short, sleep does not help process all memories equally, and emotions give our brains important clues as to what might be worth remembering (and consolidating) the most.