Moderator: Van Canna
Inevitably, at some point during a traumatic experience, fear kicks in. When it does, it is
no longer the prefrontal cortex running the show, but the brain’s fear circuitry –
especially the amygdala. Once the fear circuitry takes over, it – not the prefrontal cortex
– controls where attention goes. It could be the sound of incoming mortars or the cold
facial expression of a predatory rapist or the grip of his hand on one’s neck. Or, the fear
circuitry can direct attention away from the horrible sensations of sexual assault by
focusing attention on otherwise meaningless details. Either way, what gets attention
tends to be fragmentary sensations, not the many different elements of the unfolding
assault. And what gets attention is what is most likely to get encoded into memory.
Again, some military personnel and police officers say the same things about having frozen in this way (although understandably they seldom admit such things).
I’ve named this remarkable, disturbing, and memorable state the shocked freeze response.
It usually comes right after the detection freeze response, as a continuation of that “network reset”—and a massive amplification of it. For several seconds a person may feel shocked, dumbfounded, their mind utterly blank, at a loss for words and actions.
Trying to describe it later, people say things like, “It made no sense,” “It just didn’t compute,” “I couldn’t even think,” or “I had no idea what to do.”
Boston news outlets ran a story about Angel Toro who had been convicted of robbing and killing a desk clerk at the Boston-Southeast Howard Johnson's on Easter Sunday back in 1981.
The clerk, 47-year-old Kathleen Downey, was a Worcester State College English professor working part time at the HoJo's.
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