Did you recently suffer from a brain injury? Did you deal with memory loss afterward? If so, you are not alone. Many victims of head injuries and brain trauma suffer from memory loss and damage.

But how do brain injuries tie to memory loss? Is it possible to predict what sort of memory damage you may face based on your brain injury?

The locations of memory storage

According to Model Systems Knowledge Translation Center, you can suffer from memory loss after a head injury. This applies to injuries of all sizes. The severity of the injury impacts the severity of your memory loss or damage. But sometimes, this impact is surprisingly small.

The location of the injury itself is more important. After all, this determines if your short term or long term memory will suffer most. The frontal lobe stores short term memory while the medial temporal lobe processes long term memory. In an accident, frontal lobe damage is much more common.

Brain damage ties to memory damage

As such, many victims of crashes “forget” the events of the accident itself. In reality, the frontal lobe suffers damage during the incident that renders it incapable of storing or processing memories. You never “save” the memory of the accident, so there is nothing to recover.

If your frontal lobe suffers, you can also struggle when processing short term into long term memories. Your brain has difficulties remembering time, dates and numbers. It may be hard to recall things that someone told you multiple times, because your brain cannot store the information. Needless to say, these issues can have a severe impact on your life.