Sports-related traumatic brain injury
Rules exist within each sport to help prevent cerebral contusions and traumatic brain injuries. However, individual athletes are the best prevention against their own injuries. In a game, athletes notice when they have the symptoms of a cerebral contusion and should take themselves out of the game. It may be hard for medical personnel or coaches to notice when a player has a traumatic brain injury, so it is in the player’s best interest to be removed from play. In hockey, traumatic brain injuries constitute 10%-15% of all head injuries. With the high percent of injuries being traumatic, extensive design improvements have been made to helmets. These improvements reduce the risk of cerebral contusions by providing more padding around the skull and a chin strap that keeps the helmet snug. In baseball, major improvements to helmets have been made to protect batters from the impact a baseball can have when hitting their head. Helmets, before this major improvement, were designed to withstand a velocity of 70 mph from a pitch or foul ball. Since the company Rawlings’ new design, helmets can withstand a velocity of 100 mph and have further padding around the softer parts on the side of the skull.
False memory syndrome
Memories of traumatic experiences hide deep in the brain, causing psychiatric problems. The memory of early childhood abuse can be forgotten and remembered with more or less accuracy. "It's difficult for therapists to help these patients," Dr. Jelena Radulovic, the Dunbar Professor in Bipolar Disease at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine said, "because the patients themselves can't remember their traumatic experiences that are the root cause of their symptoms." A special mechanism of the brain has been discovered to store stress related memories. If the brain registers an overwhelming trauma, then it can essentially block that memory in a process called dissociation or detachment from reality. "The brain will attempt to protect itself". The same way the body can wall-off an abscess or foreign substance to protect the rest of the body, the brain can dissociate from an experience. In the midst of trauma, the brain may wander off and work to avoid the memory.