Inside Out is a Pixar movie following an 11-year old girl named Riley and the 5 main emotions in her head. The movie shows how emotions “work” and how they affect our memories and how we remember them. Emotion has a significant influence on attention, perception, reasoning, problem solving, learning, and memory, all of which are the cognitive processes in humans. (Tyng, Amin, Saad, & Malik, 2017). In the movie, it is portrayed that every single memory we have has an emotion attached to it. Tying et al. (2017) also says, emotion has a strong influence on attention which is a big part of encoding as well as motivating action and behavior.
Encoding starts with perception through the senses the types of encoding are auditory/phonemic, visual/structural. and semantic (see notes on What We Encode, 2018). Information is encoded to then become a memory because of attention and effort, and emotion tends to increase attention ("Memory Processes,"
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Memories are spread out across the entire brain, and through the consolidation process, the brain creates a map for navigating through the different parts to again find this new stored information (Cherry, 2017). In the movie, the train of thought, signified the consolidation process because it allowed memories to be retrieved when they are needed and brought to “headquarters”. Experts suggest that sleep (REM) can play an important role in the consolidation process, because while sleep exists to reenergize our bodies it is also a period of reflection and processing to strengthen information that was acquired during the time spent awake (Cherry, 2017). Reconsolidation is the strengthening of that information, it makes memories easier to recall ("Reconsolidation," 2009). In the movie, it is noticeable that memories affect sleep which is a form of reconsolidation because during that REM those memories are being