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Taylor Swift fans are reporting “post-concert amnesia” on social media.
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“I know I was there, but I feel like it was a dream,” Swiftie wrote.
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Too much excitement can trick the brain into thinking it’s in trouble, an expert says.
“Hang on to the memories, they’ll hang on to you,” sings Taylor Swift.
But for some Swifties, it has become difficult to retain memories of her Eras tour. Fans come forward to admit they suffer from “post-concert amnesia”.
It was like “an out-of-body experience, like it didn’t really happen to me,” Gettysburg fan Nicole Booz told Time.
“Still, I know it is because my bank account took a hit of $950 to cover the ticket,” she said.
Others took to Reddit to share their guilt over not being able to remember pivotal moments from Swift’s concert, with some saying they almost felt like they disassociated themselves from the experience.
“Went to the Arlington show a few weeks ago and honestly can’t remember most of the show,” wrote one Swiftie on Reddit. “I know I was there, but I feel like it was a dream,” added another.
Swift is two months into her blockbuster 52-stage Eras Tour. The singer covers 44 songs from her 10 studio albums during a three-hour showcase.
“The post-concert amnesia is real,” New Yorker Jenna Tocatlian told Time.
Tocatlian told Time she even forgot one of Swift’s “surprise songs” she was most hoping would appear.
“If I hadn’t had the 5 minute video that my friend kindly took from me, I probably would have told everyone that this didn’t happen,” Tocatlian said.
Too much excitement may be the culprit
This is not a Swift-specific event. Social media is littered with stories from fans unable to recall specific details from major concerts.
Ewan McNay, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York, told Time that this state can arise any time you’re faced with a very emotionally charged situation.
People often forget their first dance at a wedding, for example, she says.
It could be the body misinterpreting the signs of arousal. Jumping up and down, screaming, crying can be mistaken for a fight or flight situation.
“You say, ‘Hey, we’re really stressed: we’re running away from the bear or we’re watching Taylor Swift,'” McNay said.
Another explanation is that fans are flooding their brains with too many chemicals. The neurons then begin to fire indiscriminately. which makes it “really hard” to create new memories, McNay said.
For those who want to be emotionally present for more of the concert, there are strategies to enhance memories of the event.
Fans can try to calm down during the event, practice mindful meditation to focus on their presence, and try to limit their emotional reactions like screaming or jumping up and down, McNay said.
However, whether or not fans remember specific details from the concert is slightly off the mark, wrote Robert Kraft, professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University in Westerville, in an article for Psychology Today.
“The broader reason we forget is that we focus on experiencing the world, not remembering,” he wrote.
For him, apart from specific events that depend on memorizing specific details like exams, brains are generally not wired to record memories like a camera.
“For a major music event, we spend a lot of money on tickets and have a high level of anticipation,” he wrote.
“But if we place too much importance on memory, our expectations for memory will be too high and we will be disappointed,” he wrote.
Read the original Insider article