The Neuroscience of Being Human
The Neuroscience of Dissociation
Why the brain sometimes leaves the building when the body cannot, what happens neurologically when a person disconnects from their own experience, and how dissociation serves as the brain's last-resort protection against unbearable threat
1,499-word article with 8 Harvard references.
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Dissociation is not madness and it is not attention-seeking. It is the brain's emergency exit. When a threat is so overwhelming that neither fight nor flight is possible, the brain does something extraordinary: it disconnects the person from their own experience. The body remains present, but the sense of being inside it, of owning the experience, of being the person to whom this is happening, is suspended. This article examines the neuroscience of dissociation: the role of the periaqueductal grey in triggering the freeze response, the depersonalisation and derealisation that occur when the insula and the temporal-parietal junction alter their processing, and how the brain's most radical defence mechanism can become a habitual response that long outlasts the original danger.
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