"If I had to describe how I felt, I'd say the concert hadn't happened yet," said Guenaëlle, 22. And yet the master's student was indeed at La Défense Arena, in Paris, on May 9, to attend the event she'd been waiting for for almost a year: the concert by American pop superstar Taylor Swift, her favorite singer. "I can't remember the color of the outfits she wore, for example. On the other hand, I remember every detail of the way back and of my hotel," explained Guenaëlle.
She is not the only person to have this strange experience, in France or elsewhere, during the Eras Tour, which kicked off in March 2023 in the US. No, Taylor Swift isn't a witch who hypnotizes her audiences, as some social media conspiracy theories claim. Scientific explanations do exist.
Psychiatrist at Jersey Shore University Medical Center in New Jersey Nathan Carroll appreciates Taylor Swift's music, but doesn't call himself a "Swiftie," unlike some of his colleagues. "When they went to her concert in New Jersey and told me the next day that they'd forgotten whole portions of it, I thought it was of scientific interest," explained the doctor, who had also noted this type of testimony in the media.
Delving into the literature, he came across a syndrome: transient global amnesia, or TGA, 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 on its ability to encode memories," continued the psychiatrist who, with his team, has written an article (currently being published) on this wave of transient global amnesia in connection with Taylor Swift's tour. "Our memory is extremely sensitive to stress, whether it comes from a positive or negative experience," he stressed.
According to a study of over 200 people in Argentina, published in the journal of the Brazilian Academy of Neurology Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatria, it is nevertheless a much more common syndrome in older individuals, between the ages of 50 and 80.
"We could compare this phenomenon to post-traumatic stress disorder. The intensity of the memory, the overloading of the amygdala, the mechanisms at work to encode the emotional memory are quite similar," argued Yann Humeau, CNRS researcher at the Institut Interdisciplinaire de Neurosciences (IINS) in Bordeaux. Extreme anticipation can induce anxiety. The rise in adrenalin and cortisol, the stress hormone, can contribute to the phenomenon. Over the last 20 years or so, research into post-traumatic memory loss has focused on the hippocampus, an area of the brain particularly involved in stress.
You have 43.39% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.