The Importance of Emotional Salience

The way our memory works, as we've discussed in the past, is that these emotional events have what we call salience. It's like the amygdala literally puts a big flag up and says, hey, this is something that was important. And when we sort of go into that daydreaming or default mode network, these things stand out to us. We tend not to ruminate about things that are meaningless.