You know. The looping video clip.
It’s crazy. In a very short time, I looked at people who had something traumatic happen to them in quite a different light.
It wasn’t that I never had anything traumatic happened to me, there was just some thing… Different about that.
What is really striking to me what is the absolute and complete Fidelity inside my brain with what my eyes saw, or what my eyes think they saw. But it was crystal clear, super ultra slow motion.
It was interesting that months later, maybe six, I wasn’t really having those video clips playing like that anymore. It was as if it was fading, which I guess it was. But I was watching TV, and there was a TV series about the lawyer from the seriies “Breaking bad“, I can’t remember what the name of it was.
But I was chilled out, kind of relaxed watching the opening scene in which the character is in the car driving through suburban neighborhood. The camera angle showed what he would say driving the car, I think you saw the right rear quarter of his head or something like that.
So he’s driving along, and all of a sudden… Wham!! He hit a guy on a bicycle. Here’s the thing… I wasn’t really focused on what was going on, but as soon as the sound of that bike hitting the car happened, it completely rattled me.
I involuntarily cursed loud, fumbled frantically for the remote, to turn the TV off. I guess that experience doesn’t live far below the surface.
I can sympathize.
It did fade over the months, but if I try, I can still see it in my mind’s eye.
I have heard that adrenaline causes memories to take, so to speak, which is why we remember traumatic events so much more clearly than happy ones. The rush of adrenaline really imprints the memory in our brain.