[] How does the brain repress memories and not let people remember entire parts of their lives?
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I see a bunch of takes on psychology, which isn’t really all that related to the actual brain. So, here’s a more (simplified) neurological explanation.
Imagine your brain is a spiderweb in the shape of a pyramid. There’s an “entrypoint” at one end, that’s the tip of the pyramid, and then the strands of the web all meet together in various ways in the middle until you get to the base of the pyramid. Stuff is connected all over the place to make the web’s joints.
So, imagine the entrypoint is “stimuli”. That’s all sorts of things. The stuff you see, hear, feel, taste, smell. That’s all coming in through the entrypoint. And depending on what comes in, it bounces around to different joints, interacting with them. Once it does this, the combination of the joints that got interacted with forms a thought or memory. Like an encoding. You activate this particular set of joints to get the idea of abicycle. You change one joint, maybe it changes to a unicycle or something that you’ve learned to associate very closely to a bike. You change a bunch of joints and it’s something totally different, like your parents or the sun. Whatever. The more similar the pattern that gets touched, the more related the thoughts, generally speaking.
That’s how your brain (in a contrived sort of way) operates. But the stimuli isn’t the ONLY thing affecting that. There’s your nervous system, which gives your brain feedback. So, for instance, if your nervous system is triggered when you think of a stove in a particular way, you panic when you think about it, rather than just think “I can cook spaghetti on that”. There’s also hormones and neurotransmitters and yada, yada.
Also, your brain is a very, very interesting organ in that it can affect itself. One region of the brain can learn how to trigger another region. Even affect the stimuli it actually gets. Warp it before it gets there, or change the way it responds. Think of it like playing a game of telephone, where you stand in a line and whisper to the person next to you the secret message. Sometimes you get someone in the middle who messes up the message on purpose. It totally eliminates any chance of the people behind that person getting the correct message at all.
It’s a very complicated mechanism, but you could have the combination of your nervous system, hormones, neurotransmitters and even other parts of your own brain affecting the way thoughts are associated and recalled. Even to the degree of suppressing them altogether or distorting them horribly to something that your brain has learned to find more palatable. This is all based on the cycle of stimuli that goes through your entire body.
Unfortunately, the brain does not function in isolation. So the mechanism is excessively complicated. But, very, very neat.
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