“Hold on to the memories, they will hold on to you,” sings Taylor Swift. But for some Swifties, it’s has become difficult to hold on to memories of her Eras Tour. Fans are coming forward to admit that are suffering from”post-concert amnesia.”
It was like “an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t really happen to me,” Gettysburg fan Nicole Booz, said in an interview with Time magazine. “Yet I know it did because my bank account took a $950 hit to cover the ticket,” she said.
Others have been taking to Reddit to share their guilt at not being able to recollect crucial moments of Swift’s concert, with some saying they felt almost as if they were dissociating from the experience. “I went to the Arlington show a few weeks back and I honestly cannot remember most of the concert,” wrote one Swiftie on Reddit. “I know I was there, but it feels like it was a dream,” added another.
Swift is two months into her blockbuster 52-stop Eras Tour. The singer covers 44 songs from all 10 of her studio albums during a three-hour showcase. “Post-concert amnesia is real,” New Yorker Jenna Tocatlian told Time. Tocatlian stated she even forgot one of Swift’s “surprise songs” that she had most hoped would come up. “If I didn’t have the 5-minute video that my friend kindly took of me jamming to it, I probably would have told everyone that it didn’t happen,” she said.
As it turns out, Post Concert Amnesia isn’t a Swift-specific event. Social media is littered with accounts of fans being unable to recall specific details of important concerts. Ewan McNay, an associate professor of psychology at the State University of New York told Time that this state can happen anytime you’re faced with a situation highly-charged with emotions. “People often forget their first dance at a wedding, for instance,” she said.
This could be the body misinterpreting the signs of excitement. Jumping up and down, screaming, crying can be confused for a fight-or-flight situation. “You’re saying, ‘Hey, we’re really stressed out: we’re running away from the bear, or we’re watching Taylor Swift’,” says McNay. McNay also says that another explanation is that fans are flooding their brains with too many chemicals. Neurons then start firing indiscriminately. making it “really hard” to create new memories.
For those who want to be emotionally present for more of the concert, McNay says there are strategies to improve memories of the event. Fans can set out to try to calm themselves during the event, practice conscious meditation to focus on being present, and try to limit their emotional reactions like shouting or jumping up and down.
However, whether or not fans can remember the specific details of the concert is slightly missing the point, Robert Kraft, a professor of cognitive psychology at Otterbein University in Westerville, wrote in a post in Psychology Today. “The broadest reason we forget is that we focus on experiencing the world, not remembering it,” he wrote.
For him, outside of specific events that depend on recollecting specific details like exams, brains mostly aren’t wired to record memories like a camera. “For a major musical event, we spend a lot of money on tickets, and have a high level of anticipation,” he wrote. “But if we place too much emphasis on memory, our expectations for remembering will be too high–and we’ll be disappointed.”
So, bottom line? Enjoy the show, take some selfies and video, save your ticket stub, maybe buy a souvenir shirt, and don’t worry, be happy.
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