Going to see Taylor Swift live, you expect it to be a night to remember — but there are growing reports of people suffering amnesia after her shows.
Jenna Tocatilan, 25, from New York, said she had dreamed about seeing the pop star for so long that it was difficult to retain what was happening in her mind.
She told Time magazine that ‘post-concert amnesia is real’, adding, after seeing Swift play a ‘surprise’ song: ‘If I didn’t have the five-minute video that my friend kindly took of me jamming to it, I probably would have told everyone that it didn’t happen.’
Going to see Taylor Swift live, you expect it to be a night to remember — but there are growing reports of people suffering amnesia after her shows
Nicole Booz, 32, who attended Swift’s May 14 show in Philadelphia, said, looking back, it felt like ‘an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t really happen to me’.
Experts say there is good evidence to explain the phenomenon, which does not only happen to super-fans of Swift, who call themselves Swifties.
Neuroscientist Dr Dean Burnett, honorary research associate at Cardiff University, said: ‘If you’re at a concert of someone you love, surrounded by thousands of very excited other people, listening to music you’ve got established emotional links to, that’s going to be a lot of emotion happening to you at one time.
‘As well as being exhausting for the brain, it’s going to mean all the things you experience will have a high emotional quality, which means nothing “stands out”, and that’s important if you want to retrieve a memory later.’
Dr Ewan McNay, an associate professor in the psychology department at the State University of New York in Albany, said people’s brains react to extreme positive emotion similarly to how they react to negative stress.
This overload can make it harder to form memories, but he has advice for fans.
He said: ‘People could try to jump up and down and scream a little less, to control the excitement.’
