#but at this point i'm in constant pain Somewhere and most notably my back and my chest

[saturnvs]

the chest pain that comes with living under constant stress is really something huh. ouch

[thejakeformerlyknownasprince]

I'm not sure if you've ever been asked this but (and this is totally ignoring all ethical questions)- do you think a yeerk could bring back Loren's memories from before the crash? They seem to have far more control of their host's memories than the hosts do...

First question: does Loren want her memories back?

Maybe this seems a little odd to ask, but… she’d be remembering a lot of pain and fear, maybe a few good-ish years where she’s with Elfangor or raising baby-Tobias, and a shitton of trauma.  Losing your (traumatic) memories can actually be good for you.  Psychiatrists are developing therapies using drugs and/or ECT to help patients with PTSD and phobias deliberately remove certain memories.  The minuscule number of participants who have successfully completed the still-experimental versions of these therapies have seen considerable upticks in quality of life.

Setting aside the science for the sci fi, it’s also notable that Loren does not regain her memories when she morphs.  We don’t know how morphing tech works precisely, of course, because it sometimes heals long-term damage and sometimes doesn’t.  But my headcanon has always been that it has to do with user motivation and self-image.  A couple examples:

Alloran still has battle scars even after morphing because he’s Mr. Old School Warrior Code, and considers them a point of pride.

Ax doesn’t develop battle scars during the war because he grows up in a constant state of siege as part of a team with a whatever-works mentality, and has little time for outdated conceptualizations of honor.

James’s nervous system starts working again after morphing because he wants to be nondisabled and sees himself that way.

Collette’s nervous system doesn’t start working again after morphing because she identifies as disabled and is happy that way.

Tobias can’t heal his broken wing with morphing in MM2 because he’s still new to morphing and struggling to break away from the predator mentality of “you get hurt, you tough it out or you die.”

Etcetera, etcetera.  If we take that explanation as given for the moment, then it’s pretty striking that morphing heals Loren’s eyes but not her memories.  She says outright that she didn’t want to take care of a kid, and doesn’t feel up to the responsibility of being a mother (#49).  She’s also had 95% bad experiences with aliens, between being abducted by everyone from skrit na to Chapman and being dragged into some intergalactic war multiple times.  Healing her eyes helps her get away from the ableism and underemployment facing most blind Americans; healing her memories doesn’t necessarily get her shit.  She may or may not make a choice somewhere in there.  And even if she doesn’t, there may simply be nothing left to find.

Second question: What would a yeerk know that Loren wouldn’t?

Yes, we see that yeerks read hosts’ memories.  And it’s true that (at the very least) Temrash 114 can choose which of Jake’s memories Jake will focus on at any given time.  However, we see no evidence whatsoever of yeerks having insight into hosts’ minds that the hosts themselves lack.  In fact, the opposite might even be true; there are several moments with Eva pointedly using knowledge about Edriss that Edriss herself lacks (Visser) but Edriss simply doesn’t get Eva, nor does Temrash ever start to understand Jake.  So if Loren doesn’t consciously remember these events, then there’s no sign that the yeerk would be able to do so either.

To swerve back into science: there’s also the fact that brains don’t “hide” memories that they’ve successfully stored.  If you can’t retrieve it, usually there’s nothing left to retrieve.  You can have a “feeling of knowing” about a test item and later have the answer come to you with no further prompting, but if you don’t even have that feeling, then you probably don’t have the answer stored anywhere in your noodle.  Contrary to media depictions of amnesia (*cough* MM1 *cough*), there’s no such thing as a cure for traumatic amnesia.  (Dissociative amnesia is another story, but I digress.)  Loren sustains a blow to the head, either through a car crash or a violent controller or a violent controller-caused car crash, and that’s where her memories go.  She tells Tobias that she had to re-learn how to swallow and brush her teeth afterward (#49).  Re-learn, not remember.  That’s a pretty accurate summation of traumatic brain injuries.  Once the skills are gone, they’re gone.  It turns out brains (probably) do grow new cells even through adulthood, and even hints of neurogenesis are SO FUCKING EXCITING for people like me who study brains.  But the fact remains that memories destroyed through trauma are usually, well, destroyed.

Quick personal example: when I was 16, I got a concussion.  How?  No idea, because the concussion itself caused me to forget how it happened.  I know I was skiing at the time — waking up on a ski slope with a dented-in helmet was a pretty strong context clue — but I’m never going to know if I misjudged a turn, slipped on ice, collided with a person, hit a tree, got struck by lightning (okay probably not that) or what.  My brain went into emergency shutdown mode after I did the equivalent of spilling a soda on its keyboard, and the Microsoft Word document I had open at the time (AKA my working memory) didn’t have time to convert to ROM (AKA go through my hippocampus into long-term storage) in the process.  What happens to Loren isn’t the equivalent of spilling a soda on one’s keyboard; it’s the equivalent of throwing the whole computer off a forty-foot building into the ocean.  A skilled IT tech and a hell of a lot of work might get that thing running again, but if you think there’s a chance in hell that the family photos stored on your hard drive are gonna be found and restored, then you’ve got another think coming.

Tl;dr: Given what we know about real brains and about Your Brian on Morphing, I’m not convinced that a yeerk could help Loren if she even wanted help.