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Just unpacking Dr. Ford’s response on her memories: epinephrine and norepinephrine are the adrenaline hormones that underlie the body’s “fight-or-flight” response. In the brain, they act as neurotransmitters to heighten immediate awareness in response to fear.
The adrenaline-driven fear state sears specific memories of a trauma into the brain by linking them to the fear, but that heightened awareness is often incomplete. One will remember laughter of the attacker or some mundane detail of the room, but perhaps not the house’s address.
Importantly, the fight-or-flight response rarely preserves the exact “when” of a trauma. The adrenaline response creates a vivid memory of the trauma itself, but often without events leading up to or after the trauma, because that is outside of the epinephrine response window.
There is no value in trying to find discrepancies in Dr. Ford’s memory of the day prior to or after the trauma; no more so than you or I could play out every detail of a single day 20 years ago and not deviate slightly with every retelling. Memory just doesn’t work like that.
