Neuroscience Says This Is How You Can Turn a Bad Memory Into a Good (and Useful) Memory

I was staying in a hotel with our two grandsons and the fire alarm went off at 1 a.m. We threw on coats, hustled down the stairs, and stood in the cold in front of the building. While most fire alarms are false alarms, turns out there was a small fire.

Months later we were staying in a hotel and the fire alarm went off. One grandson immediately freaked out. The other said, “Hey, all right.”

Same event, two very different reactions. Why?

Neuroscientists call the process of linking feelings with a memory valence assignment. Once we experience something, our brains associate it with a positive or negative feeling, or valence, which helps us know whether to seek or avoid it in the future. 

For one grandson, a fire alarm is a bad memory. Fires mean buildings can burn down. Fires mean we could get badly hurt. For the other grandson, a fire alarm is a good memory. Fire alarms are early warnings that help keep people from being injured. Fires alarms mean safety.

How valence assignment happens, at a cellular level, is unclear. Scientists know that different sets of neurons are activated when a valence is positive, and others when a valence is negative. 

“We found these two pathways — analogous to railroad tracks — that were leading to positive and negative valence,” writes professor Kay Tye, “but we still didn’t know what signal was acting as the switch operator to direct which track should be used at any given time.”

So as part of a study published in Nature by Tye and her colleagues at the Salk Institute, genes were selectively edited to remove the gene for neurotensin, a signaling molecule, from the brain cells of mice; without neurotensin, the mice could no longer assign positive valence to a memory. 

Lacking neurotensin didn’t affect negative valence, though. In fact, the mice got even better at assigning negative valence. The neurons associated with negative valence stay switched on until neurotensin is released. 

Which makes sense. After all, fear is a survival instinct. Avoiding dangerous situations helped keep our ancestors alive. (Think of it as your brain’s way of saying, “I’ll assume (this) is bad… until I know for sure it’s good.”)

Then the researchers introduced high levels of neurotensin and found they could promote reward learning (think positive associations), and further dampen negative valence. According to Tye, “We can actually manipulate this switch to turn on positive or negative learning.”

All of which sounds good if you have a steady supply of neurotensin on hand. (Which, of course, you don’t.) But there are a few ways to game your neurochemical system.

One way is to reframe a negative experience. That’s what one grandson did. Initially the fire alarm scared him, but he decided to see getting out of the hotel as an adventure. And he decided to see a fire alarm as a good thing, because it’s a sign there might be a problem.

You can do the same. Say a sales demo goes poorly. That memory cause you to think you never want to do another sales demo again.

Or you could decide that memory will help you never do another sales demo that way again. Maybe you weren’t prepared. Maybe you didn’t read the room. Maybe you didn’t build in a few pauses so you could adjust, in the moment, to how your presentation was being received.

Mentally assigning positive outcomes, like, “Here’s what I learned,” to an experience will help you assign a positive valence to that experience.

In time, you’ll even think back fondly on the time you bombed, because it served as a springboard for later success.

Another way is to mentally take a step back to focus on your overall sense of self-worth before you do something difficult. A study published in Psychological Science found that a few minutes of self-affirmation minimized participants’ psychological response to failure if a particular task didn’t go well.

That’s because confidence is situational. Stick me in a gym with a bunch of people lifting weights and even if I’m not as strong, I still feel confident, and like I belong. Stick me in a Pilates class, though, and I’ll instantly feel insecure (and justifiably so.) The same is probably true for you. You probably feel self-assured speaking to ten members of your team; stick you in front of ten strangers, though, and that confidence likely disappears.

But confidence is also transferable. Success in one pursuit yields greater confidence in other areas of your life. When you feel good about yourself in one way — when you achieve some degree of success in one aspect of your life — you tend to feel better about other parts of your life as well. 

After all, if you can do one thing well, you can do lots of things well.

Before you do something that might result in a negative memory, take a moment to reflect on all the things you can do well. That way, if you fail, you’ll be able to see that moment for what it is: just one step, however feeble, on a journey to eventual achievement.

Another way is to make a feeling granular rather than general. For example, unlike a general feeling like feeling stressed, a granular emotion is a specific feeling like fear, worry, or anxiety. (Compared to feeling “happy,” a granular emotion might be pleased, delighted, or excited.)

The more general the feeling, the more likely you are to assign a negative valence to the situation that sparked the emotion.

My grandsons and I dying in the first hotel was extremely unlikely. The building had a number of exit points and stairways. It had fire escapes on opposite sides of the building, accessible from the roof. Plus we all know how to get out of a building quickly; we’ve done it before. We know what to do.

All of that helps us assign a more positive valence to a fire alarm — and hopefully hopefully respond better if it ever happens again. The grandson who assigned a negative valence came home from school the day they had a fire drill and said he wasn’t scared of fire alarms any more because unlike his classmates, he’s been in a real fire drill. (Hey, whatever works.)

Which, ultimately, is the point. You can’t always control what happens. But you can always control how you respond.

And the more positive the valence you assign to a situation, especially to a seemingly uncomfortable or challenging situation, the better you’ll be able to respond.

Because bravery isn’t an absence of fear. Bravery is doing what you need to do in spite of fear — something finding a way to assign a positive valance will make a lot easier.