The Truth Hurts by Nancy Pickard

Author:Nancy Pickard
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2002-12-06T23:00:00+00:00

One of the stray facts I happen to know from my book research is that the amygdala is said to be the organ both of fear and of memory in the human body. Fear is, as you may imagine, a big thing in true crime books, so it has behooved me to learn a lot about it. In one book I wrote about a killer who stole his victims’ pineal glands, I had cause to study the brain extensively, and I was fascinated by what I found out about the amygdala, which is a tiny, fleshy, almond-shaped organ deep in the skull. Scientists have discovered that in traumatized war veterans and abused children, the amygdala actually shrinks from its original size, thereby consigning episodes in their lives to oblivion. They forget about it, in other words. Or to put it in a way that is perhaps more subtly accurate, they can’t remember. This could be viewed, I suppose, as nature’s mercy, though it can pose a problem for both psychiatrists and prosecutors who want to dig out those memories.

What this means is that when adults who were abused as children claim they can’t remember entire years of their youth, apparently they are telling the truth. As their amygdala shrunk, it acted, symbolically at least, like a tiny fist squeezing fear-soaked memories out of their brain.

I feel as if my own amygdala is working overtime right now, pumping out fear, and I wonder how good my own memory will be of the events of this weekend? Could this be one reason why eyewitnesses do such a lousy job of remembering the traumatic events they see?

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