Gemma Speck

They felt panicked.

They felt dizzy.

That is your body being hit by a biological truck that is meant to protect you.

Our hippocampus, you guys might know this part of the brain, it's responsible for memory and learning.

This part of our brain also goes into overdrive.

Your hippocampus is basically responsible for deciding what is important for me to remember and what doesn't really matter.

The thing is, the more emotionally intense a situation or a learning experience is, the deeper that our brain encodes it.

This can lead to what we know in psychology as flashbulb memories.

These are like vivid, intrusive recollections that feel almost stuck in time.

People will talk about the moment they realized their partner of many years was lying to them or the moment a parent betrayed them or somebody at work betrayed them 20 years later in perfect detail.

They could tell you what they were wearing.

They could tell you what song was playing in the background, what cologne they could smell, what the carpet felt like beneath them.

Because your brain is basically like, if we survive this, we better know how we did it.

Because it's going to be a miracle if we did.

And we better be able to remember every moment that led to our survival in case there is a next time.

This is obviously a real problem for the healing stage.

It's honestly so annoying.

Because memories like this survive and stand the test of time.

And that's why they continue to be difficult to recover from.

Third thing that's happening in your brain, your prefrontal cortex is suppressed.