Last week, we saw how our ingrained fear response can occasionally lead us to feel threatened and anxious even when we are objectively safe. But these fear responses are also incredibly important survival mechanisms that can keep us alive and kicking in terrifying and dangerous circumstances. Many people who go through extreme traumas retain only fragmented and distorted memories of the actual traumatic event. This memory loss occurs because the brain shuts down the areas responsible for careful thought and processing, which can distract us from reacting to the threat efficiently. Meanwhile, our bodies gear up to fight, run, or…
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In 1985, English musician Clive Wearing suffered a brain infection—herpes encephalitis—that left him with both retrograde and anterograde amnesia. He was unable to remember anything prior to waking up from the coma caused by the encephalitis, and he was unable to form new memories since the coma. “It was as if every waking moment was the first waking moment,” his wife Deborah wrote in the memoir Forever Today. “Clive was under the constant impression that he had just emerged from unconsciousness because he had no evidence in his own mind of ever being awake before.” Despite suffering from one of…
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