Amnesia from trauma12/5/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() “Weirdly, I wasn’t like this in the immediate aftermath of losing my son,” says Sophie. Often, the shock and devastation from a traumatic event can leave a person feeling displaced and confused, but it’s an unpredictable process, and it isn’t always linear. The entire process of memory is very fragile.” “When we’re trying to reconstruct the memory, we’re very open to suggestions or intrusions. “If you’re held at gunpoint, all your attention is focused on the weapon, the most threatening item of the scene, hijacking all your attentional resources on to that gun and leading to the failure to perceive the rest of the scene.”īecause the memory is not fully formed, this can also lead to problems in recall further down the line. “There’s a well documented effect called the ‘weapon focus effect’,” says Staresina. If you’re held at gunpoint, all your attention is focused on the weaponĪnd things can go particularly awry when it comes to moments of heightened emotional stress, or trauma. “So, for instance, during the encoding stage, if you’re distracted for some reason, your memories don’t stand a good chance of surviving the whole metamorphosis to becoming a fully fledged memory.” It’s called the weapon focus effect. “But, during these three stages a lot of things can go wrong,” says Staresina. Memory is such a remarkable function of the mind that, for Bernhard Staresina, professor of cognitive neuroscience in the department of experimental psychology at the University of Oxford, “It’s almost a miracle that we have a memory at all.”Įssentially, there are three stages of making a memory: encoding (the learning of information), consolidation (the process of storing) and recall (the ability to access information when you need it). Then, because the memories are essentially offline, when things begin to come back they appear to be fragmented.” So you don’t fully lay down the memory of what’s happening. “Part of your brain, namely the hippocampus and the amygdala, the so-called emotional centre, basically go offline because of the chemicals, like cortisol, that are released at the point of intense stress. “It’s a really interesting function of the brain,” says Dr Chloé Rowland, a clinical psychologist. Before this, I was impeccably organised.” I spend half the day doing things I’ve already done, or thinking I’ve done things when I haven’t. “Often, I don’t even realise until the next day. In the past few months she has left her bag on the tube and in restaurants, and forgotten the names of close friends and dates. ![]() Sophie is using a pseudonym due to the ongoing legal dispute around her baby’s death. “It’s the everyday forgetfulness that bothers me most,” she says. Eight months ago, she lost her baby during childbirth, and she has found the noticeable loss of memory since then difficult to cope with. It is thought to be more common among women than men, and can last from a matter of days to months or, in rare cases, years.įor Sophie, 35, from Hackney, this is something she struggles with daily. One psychological term for the condition is dissociative amnesia – a form of memory loss that is more severe than mere forgetfulness, and that can’t be explained by another medical diagnosis. While we might associate this type of memory loss with the effects of post-traumatic stress disorder, it’s not always so neatly categorised. Some people describe it as a “fog”, or a film around reality others report chunks of time being severed and lifted from memory, or reappearing as fragments. What Juliet experienced is a common, if rarely articulated, phenomenon that occurs during points of high emotional stress, trauma and often grief. There’s nothing outside this corridor, and only the basics inside.” “It’s like your mind has been shrunk down to a single, dark corridor. Then it’s all a blur.” Her memory was shattered she describes certain periods as “blanks”, marked by forgetfulness and acute loss of basic skills – such as baking. When we found out we’d lost everything, I remember starting to feel severely physically ill. ![]()
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