In pairing the retelling of her traumatic experience with explanations of the way assault affects the brain, Blasey is educating the public about how survivors process and store violent memories and can recall them years later.
Sabrina Segal, a psychology professor at Cal State University, Channel Islands, says that Blasey was making a distinction between everyday memories that the brain records during calm, relaxed moments and traumatic memories that the brain encodes during periods of high stress and fear for one’s life.
"The hippocampus is a structure in the brain that we know basically converts short-term memory traces into long-term memory traces,” Segal said, a term that psychologists use to describe the physical change that takes place in the brain when it stores a memory. “We know this because of studies where this part of the brain was removed, and it altered a person’s ability to do that.”
