My Girlfriend Dissociated and Forgot Who I Was
Whenever I hear about stuff like this, I wonder:  Is there anything the failure modes of the human brain allow us to deduce about the software architecture?<p>Maybe memories are stored in some partitioned database, and one of the partitions is always stuff relating to "my identity", and somehow this partition can get unlinked and temporarily re-linked to a blank one, which is discarded after a few hours.<p>Hmm, maybe this is actually a feature, not a bug.  In ancient times people often had to deal with being abused, enslaved, etc.  Maybe being able to blank out really unpleasant experiences helped young slaves tolerate their abuse without becoming totally insane or going the route of suicide or rebellion (assuming the latter's success rate was negligible, rebellion would basically be the same as suicide from the standpoint of evolutionary pressures).  Which ultimately helped them survive and reproduce.<p>Then once the mechanism exists, it can still get triggered naturally in modern humans if they're abused, or artificially by drugs.