[ nahida truly stumbled on one of his special interests here, so. fei du makes a thoughtful noise, tilting his head back and forth. ] It depends. Most of the time, if someone's lost memories, it's because of two factors. The first is through a traumatic brain injury. Damage around the temporal lobe, if it's severe enough, can cause either anterograde or retrograde amnesia. Sometimes patients recover, and sometimes they don't, but, that's honestly not my area of expertise.
[ medical knowledge... who cares.... ]
Rather, I've always been interested in traumatic memory loss. The brain is an incredible organ, and it does its best to protect itself. When an experience is particularly traumatizing, enough that it overwhelms your internalized coping mechanisms, the body looks for a way to process the trauma, and sometimes it decides that you shouldn't relive it for your own safety. This can lead to forgetting a single event to forgetting parts, to forgetting entire years of your life, depending on how bad it is, because the brain will quite literally build a new neural pathway around the event itself in your memories. Dissociative amnesia is a direct side effect of post-traumatic stress disorder, too.
In terms of recovery; sometimes, therapy helps. Sometimes, reenacting the circumstances that led to the traumatic event will cause you to remember, but there's no real guarantee.
no subject
[ medical knowledge... who cares.... ]
Rather, I've always been interested in traumatic memory loss. The brain is an incredible organ, and it does its best to protect itself. When an experience is particularly traumatizing, enough that it overwhelms your internalized coping mechanisms, the body looks for a way to process the trauma, and sometimes it decides that you shouldn't relive it for your own safety. This can lead to forgetting a single event to forgetting parts, to forgetting entire years of your life, depending on how bad it is, because the brain will quite literally build a new neural pathway around the event itself in your memories. Dissociative amnesia is a direct side effect of post-traumatic stress disorder, too.
In terms of recovery; sometimes, therapy helps. Sometimes, reenacting the circumstances that led to the traumatic event will cause you to remember, but there's no real guarantee.