The Librarian (Hippocampus)

Curled like a seahorse inside your temporal lobe is the Hippocampus (literal Greek for "Seahorse"). This is your brain's Librarian.

When you experience an event, it is just raw data—sights, sounds, smells. The Hippocampus takes these fragments and binds them into a coherent narrative: "Last Tuesday, I went to the store." This process is called Consolidation.

Trauma: When the Librarian Quits

During extreme stress (trauma), the Amygdala screams so loud that the Hippocampus shuts down. The event is captured, but it is not processed. It is not put on a shelf with a date and time stamp.

These unprocessed shards of memory float in the brain like shrapnel. A smell or a sound can trigger them, and you feel—viscerally—that the trauma is happening right now. This is PTSD. It is a failure of the Librarian.

The Inheritance of Perspective

Your memories are not fixed recordings. Every time you recall them, the Librarian takes them off the shelf, dusts them off, and rewrites them slightly before putting them back. This is called "Reconsolidation."

This is hopeful. It means your past is not a prison. With the right tools, we can reopen the books of your history and write a new ending.