“If I had to describe my feeling, I would say that the concert has not happened yet”, says Guenaëlle, 22 years old. And yet the purchasing master’s student was indeed at La Défense Arena, in Paris, on May 9, to attend the event she had been waiting for for almost a year: the concert of Taylor Swift, American pop star, her favorite singer. “I can’t remember the color of the outfits she wore, for example. On the other hand, I remember very well every detail of the way back and my hotel,” explains Guenaëlle.
A situation that she is not the only one to have experienced, in France or elsewhere, during the Eras Tour, the star’s tour, which began in March 2023 in the United States. No, Taylor Swift is not a witch who would hypnotize her spectators, as claimed by some conspiracy theories on social networks. Scientific explanations exist.
Psychiatrist at Jersey Shore University Medical Center, New Jersey (United States), Nathan Carroll enjoys Taylor Swift’s music, but doesn’t call herself one “Swiftie”, unconditional fan, unlike some of his colleagues. “When they went to his concert in New Jersey and told me the next day that they had forgotten whole portions, I said to myself that this had scientific interest”explains the doctor, who had also noted this type of testimony in the media.
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Delving into the literature, he came across a syndrome: transient global amnesia, or amnestic ictus, which is characterized by memory loss over a short period of time. “Too much excitement is experienced by the brain as stress, and this impacts its ability to encode memories”continues the psychiatrist who, with his team, wrote an article (currently being published) on this wave of transient global amnesia linked to Taylor Swift’s tour. “Our memory is extremely sensitive to stress, whether it comes from a positive or negative experience”he emphasizes.
Adrenaline and cortisol surge
According to a study carried out on more than 200 people in Argentina, published in the journal of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria,However, it is a much more common syndrome in older individuals, between 50 and 80 years old.
“We could compare this phenomenon to what post-traumatic stress states do. The intensity of the memory, the overuse of the amygdala, the mechanisms at work to encode the emotional memory are significantly similar. advances Yann Humeau, CNRS researcher at the Interdisciplinary Institute of Neurosciences (IINS) in Bordeaux. Extreme anticipation can induce anxiety. The rush of adrenaline and cortisol, the stress hormone, can contribute to the phenomenon. Over the past twenty years, research on post-traumatic memory loss has been focused on the hippocampus, an area of the brain particularly involved in stress.
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