That would be one hell of a disorienting experience. Memory is one of those things as fascinating as it is troubling. I remember my freshman psych class and being so disturbed that, even without brain damage, the mind can reinterpret events and record them as if they really happened in a way they didn't. I can't imagine how unsettling it would be for that to happen on a larger scale.
Exactly. If I recall anything from my elective psych classes in college, I remember the creepy plasticity of memory. It's why I love Salvador Dali's clock paintings so much
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That makes so much sense, I mean the brain does file things. Everything is so delicately balanced between chemicals and electrical impulses in ways that we don't fully understand. The psychiatrist I saw for OCD flat out admitted, "Yeah, we don't really know how these drugs work, we just know that they do." Hopefully one day it will be as simple as taking a drug and flipping a switch on the right impulses to restore disintegrated memories. We've made so many strides in our understanding of neural plasticity, we're just not there yet.
What do you think of memory journals? I read of someone doing that years ago, and she just had friends and family members help her piece together the narrative for various important memories in her life so she could reference them when she needed. I can't attest to the effectiveness personally, though, and you may have already tried that.
Some of my friends have kept memory journals since they were teenagers. A couple of them had seizures and brain traumas and developed amnesia, and those journals were lifelines... I'm thinking about it...
i've never told anyone this, because i'm pretty sure it wouldn't help my "psychotic depression" case, but i have extremely vivid memories of things that, when i tell them to other people who were there in the memories, never happened. it's quite upsetting. but as, frequently, my memories turn out to have been dreams, i just assume i dreamt a large portion of my childhood, too.
otoh i had massive seizures as a toddler and mental illness- & migraine-related brain damage. i'm not surprised by anything anymore.
Every person is their own unreliable narrator - memory is notoriously fluid and creative. This is part of why memories retrieved under hypnosis (which promotes an even greater fluid, imaginative state) are no longer used as legal proof.
(Which is not to say that memory problems don't exist - but to some extent the filling in of gaps affects everyone. I am convinced that I was left-handed before I started school, but I'm not sure if I'm misremembering that or not!)
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What do you think of memory journals? I read of someone doing that years ago, and she just had friends and family members help her piece together the narrative for various important memories in her life so she could reference them when she needed. I can't attest to the effectiveness personally, though, and you may have already tried that.
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I'm thinking about it...
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otoh i had massive seizures as a toddler and mental illness- & migraine-related brain damage. i'm not surprised by anything anymore.
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It no longer surprises me that my seizures and migraines might be damaging my memories. Temporal lobes, afterall.
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(Which is not to say that memory problems don't exist - but to some extent the filling in of gaps affects everyone. I am convinced that I was left-handed before I started school, but I'm not sure if I'm misremembering that or not!)
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I really do want to try hypnotherapy for many reasons...
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