A rare phenomenon is leading Taylor Swift fans to forget parts of her show after seeing the pop star performing on her highly anticipated Eras Tour.
Jenna Tocatlian, 25, told Time magazine that the anticipation of seeing her idol finally perform in front of her eyes was so much for her brain to take that she found it difficult to retain what happening in her mind. She talked about experiencing Swift perform at a Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts.
“Post-concert amnesia is real,” Tocatlian who lives in New York said. One of the “surprise songs” performed by Swift on the night was Better Man, which was one of her top picks, but the experience of seeing and hearing the song still felt surreal to her. “If I didn’t have the 5-minute video that my friend kindly took of me jamming to it, I probably would have told everyone that it didn’t happen,” she said.
“It’s hard to put together what you actually witness,” she said. “You’re having all these emotions while your favorite songs are playing, and you’re like, ‘Wow, where am I?’” As she waited for an hour to exit the stadium, she said that she found it difficult to grasp the reality of the night.
Nicole Booz, 32, of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, who attended Swift’s show in Philadelphia on May 14 opened up about his it feels like “an out-of-body experience, as though it didn’t really happen to me. Yet I know it did because my bank account took a $950 hit to cover the ticket.”
These two are only a few of the thousands of fans who have taken to social media to share their inability to recall the events of the show. It ranged from small details to even significant parts of the concert. Some even felt guilty at not having a recollection of the event that they had been waiting for a long time to experience.
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Ewan McNay, an associate professor in the department of psychology at the State University of New York at Albany said: “This is not a concert-specific phenomenon—it can happen any time you’re in a highly emotional state.”
It has all got to do with the body’s stress levels which increase when someone is excited or distressed. The neurons associated with memory start firing indiscriminately. “If you’re slightly on edge, with a little bit of excitement, you’ll actually remember better,” McNay told the magazine. “But too much excitement pushes you over the edge in terms of memory formation, and you’re unable to make memories.”
