After suffering from a head injury, you may also suffer from brain trauma. This can impact many of your mental faculties. For many victims, memory damage is the first big impact that you may notice.
But how do brain injuries affect memory? How long does it take your memory to return to normal?
How brain injuries affect memory
The Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center examines how brain trauma and memory loss relate. Different areas of the brain hold responsibility for memory storage, sorting and translation. The way your brain processes memories is actually very complex and involves many areas. Thus, it is not as simple as a brain injury impacting one specific memory or type of memory.
Instead, brain injuries tend to impact memory as a whole. You may struggle to retain short term memory in the frontal lobe. This area of the brain captures memories for 15 to 30 seconds at a time before transferring the information to the medial temporal lobe. Here, short term memories get processed into long term memory for storage.
As such, you will likely suffer from difficulties coding short term into long term memories, too. This makes it hard to recall things like appointment dates or times unless you write the information down when it is fresh in your head.
Recovering from memory damage
The recovery process for memory loss and damage varies from person to person. A lot of it depends on your specific brain injury and the type of recovery methods you have available to you. Follow the doctor’s recommendations to recover in the fastest and smoothest way possible.