Examples Of Episodic Memory

Fear is something that has been around as long as humans have existed. Some people refer to it as a feeling or emotion, but there is an abundant amount of science that goes into experiencing fear. “Fear is a chain reaction in the brain, that begins with a stressful stimulus and ends with a chemical reaction that causes a racing heart, clammy hands, fast breathing, and energized muscles” (Layton, 2005). The stimulus could be a spider, a roaring thunderstorm, a room full of people waiting for you to get up and give a speech, or a knife at your throat.

The brain is a complex organ, made up of more than one hundred billion nerve cells, forming an intricate network that is the starting point of everything we think, sense, and feel. Some of these

As you age, your brain shrinks, although, brain changes do not occur to the same extent in all brain regions. The most widely seen cognitive change associated with ageing is that of memory. “Episodic memory is defined as “a form of memory in which information is stored with ‘mental tags', about where, when and how the information was picked up (Rauth, 2006). An example of an episodic memory would be a memory of your first day at school, the important meeting you attended last week, or the lesson where you learnt that Paris is the capital of France. Episodic memory performance is thought to decline from middle age onwards. This might seem irrelevant, but it can affect your fears. If you cannot remember what the cause of your fear was, you might no longer have that fear. For example, if you have the fear of sharks, because you watched a scary documentary about sharks, but that was twenty-two years ago, and now you can no longer recall watching that shark documentary. Most likely you would no longer be afraid of sharks anymore, because you can’t remember why you ever were. Another large factor in what scares you is simply maturity. As a child, you might have been scared of monsters under your bed, but as you grew, came to realize that monsters were non-existent, and no longer have a reason to fear those monsters under the