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

communications lead to conscious actions and thoughts, while others produce autonomic responses, involuntary responses that you cannot control. The response to fear is almost entirely an autonomic response. An autonomic response is a response that involuntary and reflexively. We don’t consciously trigger these responses, and cannot prevent them from occurring. It’s a quick process that takes less than a couple of seconds, but could determine whether you live or die. You take in and process information from your surroundings in the central nervous system. Your thalamus then decides where to send incoming sensory data. From there your sensory cortex interprets the data, and your hippocampus stores and retrieves conscious memories, as well as processes sets of stimuli to establish context. After that, your amygdala decodes your emotions, determines if there is a possible threat, and stores fear memories. Finally, your hypothalamus activates your fight or flight response, determining whether you run or put up a fight.
There are many different types of fears and phobias, but not as many responses to fear as you might think. There are two main responses to a terrifying stimulus, commonly known as the fight-or-flight response. When put in a scary situation, people will either have the impulse to flee or attack, due to adrenaline. The overall effect of adrenaline is to prepare the body for the ‘fight or flight’ response in times of stress, ie, for vigorous and/or sudden action. When faced with the situation of a dangerous intruder, whether at work, school, or home, humans will be faced by a choice. Run and try to get away from the situation, or stand up and fight this intruder. Your decision will be made quickly, and most likely based on adrenaline. Different people will have different responses to the same situation.
Two basic categories of fears are innate and learned fears (Kounang, 2015). According to Merriam Webster Dictionary, innate means “existing from the time a person or animal is born; existing as part of the basic nature of something”. “We are born with only two innate fears: the fear of falling and the fear of loud sounds” (Kounang, 2015). A 1960 study by Eleanor J. Gibson and Richard D. Walk from Cornell University evaluated depth perception among 6- to14-month-old infants, as well as young animals. Researchers placed the subjects on a platform that had plexiglass just beyond its edge to it to see how many of the subjects would actually step over the "visual cliff." Most of the subjects -- both children and animals -- didn't go "over" and step out on to the plexiglass. The fear of falling is an instinct necessary for the survival of many species. The second innate fear is the fear of loud sounds. When you hear loud sounds, you most likely will react with a fight or flight type response. It's called "your acoustic startle reflex," said Seth Norrholm, a translational neuroscientist at Emory University. Norrholm explained that if a sound is loud enough "you're going to duck down your head. Loud noises typically means startling. That circuitry is innate (Kounang, 2015)." It's a response we have, that signals something dangerous may be around the corner.
The other type of fear is learned fears. Most fear is learned. Spiders, snakes, the dark -- these are called natural fears, developed at a young age, influenced by our environment and culture. So a young child isn't automatically scared of spiders, but builds on cues from his parents. It is the same exact response a child has to scary Halloween decorations. A young child may not know that a skeleton is a scary, until his parents say over and over how skeleton decorations are spooky. According to "Helping Children Overcome Fears", "Babies have learned what their moms and dads look like. Strangers are unfamiliar to them. Children don't know if they can trust strangers" (Goetze, Giselle). This was stated after a study that showed common age related fear in young children. Without this fear, children would be more approachable to strangers and trust anyone they met. This shows fear is a necessary response to recognize threats and respond to dangers. Fears also are learned through connections. “As we get older, fears are developed because of association” (Kounang, 2015). If you are bitten by a black widow, and sent to the hospital because of the poisonous bite, most likely from now on you will associate black widows and spiders to poison, and your trip to the hospital because of that one spider bite. Every person is different when it comes to fear.
Fear and age is something that might seem to be two completely unrelated topics, but can actually affect each other greatly.

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

bed.
Overall, fear is a complicated emotion, with almost an infinite amount of factors that can affect it.