When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning It Was Friday Summary

Isaiah Chen

Allen Ellenzweig

21 October 2014

How Memory Affects The Way We Connect People constantly experience good memories and are capable of easily sharing them with their peers, but those who have endured traumatic experiences have more difficulty communicating them. Those bad memories can actually be forgotten due to people’s ability to dissociate, which causes the brain to treat those memories differently. Because of how different levels of dissociation affect the brain, memories can be disorganized and make it difficult for people to form connections with themselves and with other people. Martha Stout’s “When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, It Was Friday” discusses how people who have been traumatized continually enter into a “dissociative

Trauma causes the “areas of the brain involved in memory, particularly the amygdala and the hippocampus” to stop working properly (Stout 421). Stout talks about how the “amygdala [normally] receives sensory information[,] … attaches emotional significance to [it], and then passes [it] to the hippocampus” (421). However, she states, “traumatic input is not usefully organized by the hippocampus … or integrated with other memories (421). The memories of a traumatic experience cannot be remembered as a whole and cannot be easily communicated to others due to a temporary shut down of “Broca’s area, [which is the part] of the brain that translates experience into language” (421). Because of the brain and how it functions under emotional stress, memories can become difficult to communicate to others, preventing the formation of strong bonds with others. This is supported by Fredrickson’s insight on the amygdala in the brain. She writes about how the amygdala acts under the influence of increased amounts of oxytocin, which helps with social bonding and attachment (114). Due to an increase in oxytocin, “the parts of [the] amygdala that tune in to threats are muted [and] the parts that tune in to positive social opportunities are amplified” (116). This results in a decrease in cortisol, the stress hormone and helps to create opportunities for positive social connections to occur (116). However, Fredrickson does not consider the effect of trauma on the amygdala. During a traumatic situation, more cortisol would be produced and the parts of the amygdala that tune in to threats would not be muted. Positive social opportunities would not be amplified and the possibility to form connections would be nearly nonexistent. Due to how the brain works under the impact of increased cortisol and the amount of people who would suffer from traumatic situations, it is apparent that the