why humans seem particularly bad at understanding devastating news, such as the death of a loved one. Why is our first reaction usually to not being able to process the information? Is it not psychologically disadvantageous to not be able to understand and respond to such news?
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Humans don’t always remember stuff when told the first time. We also try and make best guesses based on past experiences and it’s hard to guess based on an experience we’ve never had, like grandma being dead, especially when we are so used to grandma being alive we keep expecting her to appear because that’s literally how it’s always been. It takes time to update the files, and it can be painful having to remember each time – it’s an emotional as well as cognitive experience so there’s a lot going on. There’s some more info about predictions and the brain here in a TED talk by Lisa Feldman Barrett: https://youtu.be/0gks6ceq4eQ
A further consideration could be that hearing someone you love has tied could be overwhelming to the point of trauma. Traumatic experiences sometimes skip the hippocampus (part of the brain involved in making memories) as well as language areas of the brain due to the need to access primal survival functions like fight, fight and freeze responses. Accessing the primal part of the brain takes less time (even if it’s a millionth of a second) compared to the comparatively newer areas like language and complex thought. This could be why people can’t recall trauma and get PTSD where they replay/experience events outside of conscious awareness.
This is a remembering of info from The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Van der Kolk, an excellent resource about trauma and the brain/body, by a human so may not be recalled 100% perfectly!
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