When thinking about the most important moment(s) of your life, do you still feel the full range of emotion associated with that memory? What if you keep recalling the same memory many times, does the intensity of emotion fade?
“Core memory” doesn’t mean emotional. It means formative. It’s something that makes you who you are, and emotion doesn’t have to be tied to that.
So exhausting the emotion doesn’t mean exhausting the core memory.
Strong emotion is most often a lack of processing. Once your brain processes something sufficiently, the emotion fades. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t affect who you are.
Just anecdotally from my own life, they become more like thinking back to a dream you had last night. There is a knowledge of, or a familiarity with the emotions, but a lack of definite certainty about the content. You know it’s yours, you know what it meant, you know what you experienced, but without reality to guide you and only through memory. When you do experience the guidance of reality, through songs, words, sights, smells, then the clarity/intensity can also come back. And that doesn’t fade or I wouldn’t use that word, you can get so familiar to it that it isn’t carrying the weight it once did. Loss feels like loss, shame like shame, love like love… It’s not that it fades into nothing, or that the quality of it diminishes. It’s more that you bought a summer coat but it’s winter now, it’s not needed anymore. Still beautiful, still wearable, still looking good on you, just that it isn’t the right thing to wear right now.
I think the mechanism in your brain exists
Think of a song that you find pretty sad, overtime the more you play it, it loses it’s emotional influence on you. Therefore I think it is indeed possible for the emotions in a memory to weaken overtime and eventually, whether for better or for worse, disappear entirely
You can do this on purpose to, for example, remove the traumatic emotions associated with a memory, but this doesn’t happen easily nor unintentionally
I think this question would fit better on askscience.
The short answer is that the emotions themselves don’t “fade”, but every time you recall a memory, you are also recalling all previous recalls, and the emotions related to the event you remember are not the same as the emotions on each subsequent recall.
We use computers as an analogy for the 🧠, and there are some reasons for that, but they are not the same, and this analogy have limits.
The brain evolved to keep us alive, and reproduce. Keep a perfect record of previous events would be costly and unnecessary for that. “Learn the lesson” and keep a registry that resembles the past is enough.
(But I’m not a neuroscientist, so I may be wrong, missing something or not updated)
