RE: Emotions Can 'Hangover' and Bias Our Future Memories
there's well known related thing to this experiment, if you do something every day it becomes a routine, if you drive your car to a job every day then you will not remember each ride after certain amount of time, if some one would ask you what you did at nine a.m. one year ago then you would assume that you were driving your car to your job at that time, but you wouldn't actually remember it, if one day on the way to your job asteroid suddenly falls then you will remember this ride for the rest of your life with details what happened before and after asteroid fell. As I understood this experiment is telling us that you will remember better what happened this day after asteroid fell than what happened before asteroid fell. Logically it makes sense because you would start to pay much more attention to everything after dramatic events, everything suddenly have more meaning to you.
But there is another aspect too. Sometimes I remember very old events out of nowhere in vivid details. When one thing starts I keep remembering a whole lot of past experiences mostly related to location or person but not that related to the time. Memory recall could even be sort of a flow state we can tap into and control. I know that meditation helps in this aspect from my personal experiences. I've seen te best results from Ānāpānasati Meditation
Yup, good point, the emotional state makes us more aware. I think it's a survival component too ;)