Todd discovered that we actually encode important events in a far richer way than ordinary events. “It’s as if the event is burned more vividly into our perceptual awareness,” she told me. “Part of the reason is that the amygdala, a brain region that is key for tagging the emotional importance of things, talks to the visual cortex—the part of the brain that allows sight—and ramps up its activity so that we are actually perceiving those events more actively.”
