If ignorance is bliss than is bliss ignorance? Maybe, according to scientists.
Its been known for a while now that one difference between depression and elation is the brain’s tendency to focus in the former and flit from through to thought in the other. This is something we’ve all experienced: when we’re sad, we sometimes feel like we can’t think about anything except whatever’s getting us down.
Experiments and tests on this have been thoroughly performed to find all kinds of effects. Some experiments have even shown how people who were in sad moods remembered more and better details in certain situations than those who were neutral or happy. Those who were in good moods were more likely to add extraneous or inaccurate details.
This makes sense, considering the associative network which our brain uses to learm process, and store memories. If a person is happy, she’ll associate an experience with more different thoughts than someone who is sad, dwelling on only one thought.
So how do we use this phenomena? It’s less a matter of what we can do in advance, than he we go about evaluating someone’s memories. Its not likely that we can “make” ourselves sad so that we are better equipped to remember a given experience.
But we can note that, if there are inconsistencies in our recall, maybe that’s proof we had a good time!
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