I don't mean to be negative Lucy, but I think you're misinterpreting what the videos say.

People who are knocked unconscious by their head injuries don't just wake up refreshed and ready to run a 10k or anything, they experience the same post concussive symptoms that all of us have, and are just as likely to experience prolonged Post Concussion Syndrome as someone who sustains a head injury without losing consciousness. Being knocked out is not a "get out of PCS free card", if anything it's an indication that the actual DAMAGE that was sustained to the brain was more significant than the DAMAGE that was sustained to a person who didn't lose consciousness.

And that's where the real interesting part of this syndrome lies. Most of the people I've met on this site have had CT scans and MRIs that have all come back showing no signs of damage whatsoever, so why does this brain that appears perfectly fine not function that way? The answer, this video asserts, lies in the emotional/psychological trauma that occurs along with the physical impact, or has occurred prior to the physical impact.

When the human brain perceives itself to be in a state of mortal danger, meaning it feels as though it could die as a result of the threat that it's faced with, it enters a defensive stance. If it never surrenders that defensive stance, that moment in time that the threat occurred in essence gets LOCKED into their system. The body still gets up, moves around, goes through its day to day activities, and so on, but the brain remains tied into the moment in time that the injury occurred. In essence, the mind of the person who sustained the trauma is living in a different time than the body of that same person. Consequences including disassociation from friends and relatives, a sense of not being connected to their surroundings, fear, depression, and most importantly in cases of physical injuries, an inability within the body to heal itself, often resulting in chronic pain, mysterious illnesses, and in the case of brain injuries, prolonged post concussion syndrome. That is what the guy in the video was saying, it is not incontrovertible fact, but it is a very compelling argument (and from my personal experience, it is the "right" argument for the problems that I currently face, as the Post Traumatic Stress that my body is locked in has become more and more apparent as I have aged following my injury).

Now, in a lot of our cases, the trauma argument does not make a great deal of sense rationally. Take me for example, it was my birthday, I was drunk, I fell over and hit my head, and then I got back up. Not exactly the most traumatic experience that someone could imagine, BUT, the subconscious mind (where bodily reactions of life or death are resolved) is in no way a rational creature. This explains how some people see a non poisonous spider and think "big deal" while others see that same spider and immediately go into a terror reaction, their thought process at that time being "I'm going to die, and this spider is going to kill me". Same spider, same complete lack of threat, same situation, and yet two entirely different reactions. To use another example, two men sustain identical head injuries, one man's body recognizes his injury as nothing more than a mild concussion, and he heals within a week. The other man's body recognizes his injury as a threat to his very existence, so the body enters a freeze response. 5 years later he has yet to heal. This is the subconscious mind, it is in no way rational.

I would not be at all surprised to find that most everyone on this site either experienced a significant trauma at the time of their injury (such as a violent car accident), or had experienced a significant trauma BEFORE their injury (be it a difficult birth, child abuse, sexual abuse, seeing someone get killed, being attacked by a dog, or anything else you can think of that could leave a lasting psychological mark on the body). If a past trauma is never resolved, the body loses much or all of its resiliency.

In the video Dr. Scaer references a test that was done on a group of baby chicks. The chicks were broken up into 3 groups: one group would be traumatized, then left on its own to discharge the trauma. The second group would be traumatized persistantly until the chicks entered a clear freeze response to their trauma. The third group would not be traumatized at all, this group would be the control (please note that the "traumatizing" they did to these chicks was not violent, it was docile, like flipping them over on their backs or something like that... an action that for whatever reason physiologically causes chicks to enter a fight or flight response).

After the chicks were traumatized (or in the case of the last group, not traumatized), the chicks were placed in a bowl of water to judge their resiliancy to stress.

The chicks that had not been traumatized at all swam for a couple of minutes before running out of energy and sinking to the bottom.

The chicks that had been traumatized but allowed to discharge their trauma actually swam longer than the untraumatized group, before running out of energy and sinking to the bottom.

The chicks that were traumatized repeatedly and not allowed to discharge immediately sank to the bottom without swimming at all.

In the eyes of Dr. Scaer, we fall into the last group. If he's right, resolving the psychological trauma BENEATH the physical injury is the key to healing.