You probably remember why Katniss called Prim “little duck.” It’s a detail that’s important to the story. But—unless you share my personal fascination with mice and nasty-bad soup—Sae’s recipe isn’t stashed in long-term memory. That’s because every individual has a unique brain in charge of selecting information and forming memories. Depending on our previous experiences, we notice some things and ignore others. In the process, we build an ever-more-specialized system for dealing with the world. We can donate a kidney or a chunk of liver or a pint of blood to someone else and those cells have a good chance of being useful, but the brain and the memories in it can’t be transplanted. Brains are weird, custom-made, do-it-yourself projects.

The Hunger Games is an especially good series to read with the brain in mind. Nightmares, memories, and hallucinations are an important part of the story—and all of those things are brain business. Why does Katniss behave as she does? I think the answer to that question depends upon understanding her brain, not her heart. In order to understand Katniss and her choices, we have to understand how a brain makes sense of the world and what happens to a brain when it’s plunged into the senseless world of the Games! arena.

We’ll start with brain building, focusing on the way the newborn brain makes sense of the self, the physical world, and the social environment. With that foundation, we can look at the way memory happens, both in normal situations and in traumatic circumstances. The Hunger Games is a frightening experience that bends, breaks, and shatters minds. When we look at the tributes individually, their behaviors reflect the damage done. Finally, we can look at healing, the ways that damaged minds might mend—at the way that Katniss and Peeta move forward at the conclusion of the book.

Delayed development isn’t the only way that the brain differs from the rest of the body. Bones or muscles have to add cells to mature, but the maturing brain subtracts cells, weeding out an overabundance of neurons. The result is an ever-more efficient network. Scientists refer to this process as pruning.

This “less is more” approach also drives the brain’s first encounters with the world. It has to sift through a “blooming, buzzing confusion” of sensory impressions.¹⁸ If you take a moment to notice all the things you usually don’t—like the pressure of clothing against your skin, the multitude of hums and whispers in the air, and the motionless things at the edge of your peripheral vision—you realize that awareness is as much about deciding what can safely be ignored as paying attention to useful kernels of information.

Babies are dedicated researchers, and the world is their laboratory. An infant begins by discovering the self, making the connection between mind and body—essentially learning to use the equipment. It takes trial and error to discover how to do complicated tasks like focusing the eyes and “finding” the hands. Once the hands and eyes are coordinated, exploration of the physical world progresses rapidly. Splashing around in a bath provides information about the nature of water and the power of the body to move things. Chucking a toy to the floor is an excellent test of gravity, and, after gravity has been proven reliable, it becomes a social experiment. How many times will someone pick it up and give it back? All of this activity is about discovering the self, the physical environment, and the social world. Once that foundation is laid, learning new things and responding in creative ways to new situations becomes possible—as long as we have a system to store and access experiences. That system is memory.

Brain cells, like all cells, communicate chemically, and some of the most powerful chemicals that affect brain cells are those that help us respond to danger. It wouldn’t matter what other fancy things the brain could do if it didn’t have some skills useful for keeping us alive. It needs to recognize danger and figure out how to avoid it. Remembering which berries are poisonous can mean the difference between life and death. We evaluate the present and future based on memories of past experience. When we learn, the brain remodels, building corresponding networks of connections among cells.

We have control over some of the memories we build. Studying is basically all about making memories on purpose. If you repeatedly think about myomancy, which means foretelling the future by observing the behavior of mice, you will be able to access that memory and use it. (Although a future where knowledge about myomancy is a practical skill is hard to imagine.) There are other memories that happen without study. These involuntary memories are often tied to exciting, unexpected events in life—like waking up to find a mouse walking across your face. If that happens, you are likely to experience a flood of chemicals that makes your heart race and excites your brain. The moment you felt mouse toenails on your eyelid is a moment you’ll remember, whether you want to or not. Mice can be startling, and that kind of surprise sets chemicals coursing through the brain that cause very strong connections to form without repetition. You only need one frightening encounter to learn to be wary of a situation that might cause you harm. That’s handy, since repeated exposure to potential dangers is—well—dangerous.

If you end up seeing mice or feeling little mouse feet in your dreams, that’s a sign the experience has made a cozy nest in your neurons. Although science doesn’t know the exact mechanisms, there seems to be a connection between dreaming and building lasting, accessible memories. Not every experience is dreamworthy, and not everything we see or do or discover ends up in long-term memory, either.

Two things seem necessary for experiences to be successfully stored in long-term memory. First, the connections the experience forms between networked cells must be strong and enduring. The network needs to be in place for potential reactivation so the memory can “happen” in the brain. Second, the memory must undergo a process called “consolidation.” Dreams may be tools we use to sift through the day’s new memory networks and “consolidate” them. The brain, after all, is still just trying to make sense of all those experiences. Making narratives is a way to make sense of events, and dreams might just be efforts to tell a story, to put the pieces together.

That’s the way memory works when things are “normal.” But the world the brain lives in isn’t always safe and secure. Some surprises—a serious injury to your body or witnessing a bloody accident—are far more horrific than a mouse. It isn’t easy to integrate those shocking experiences with other memories. Sometimes fear doesn’t fade, and instead of a single wash of chemicals to help build quick, strong connections, the brain experiences wave after wave of them. There is no time for the brain to rest, to sort through the networks, and make sense of what has happened. Sometimes the world is more like the Hunger Games.

The symptoms of PTSD fall into three different categories.

Living with a “chainsaw” memory is intense. As the brain struggles to “learn” and store the memory, recurring nightmares can happen. Fear, real fear, bubbles up in reaction to the nightmare, which just makes the memory stronger. Everyday sensations—a smell, a flashing light—can be linked to the original, horrifying experience and become “triggers”¹⁹ that evoke vivid involuntary memories called flashbacks. Flashbacks don’t seem like a memory. They feel real. The brain relives the memory as a present, frightening reality. For Katniss, Snow’s white roses are a powerful trigger. Their unmistakable bioengineered scent is strongly linked to her encounters with him. To smell that perfume, the mingling of blood and flowers, is to be in his presence. That is why Snow leaves the rose in the vase for Katniss to find after she returns to District 12. He knows that he has forged a connection and built a trigger that will make her afraid.

There is another sort of avoidance that carries a much higher price: emotional numbing. Here again, the logic is simple. If you can’t feel it, it can’t hurt you. But numbing-out dulls all emotions, not just the unpleasant ones. Katniss’ mother provides an early example of this emotional shutdown and its consequences. To avoid emotional pain after the mine explosion, she becomes so numbed and withdrawn she is unavailable to her daughters. Blunting sorrow means blunting happiness, and dodging grief means dodging love. Katniss is angry with her mother, but she is also learning from her example. One of the very first things Katniss reveals about herself is that she is determined never to marry, never to have children, because she can’t imagine a future where those children will be safe from the reaping. Even before she is made a tribute, Katniss has been hurt by the Games. She, like many children who suffer from PTSD, has a foreshortened sense of the future. She expects the worst because, so far, the worst has happened. That is why Gale can’t be more than a hunting partner—ever. Katniss will lay down her life to defend children already in the world, like her sister Prim and Gale’s little sister Posy, but she won’t give the world any more hostages. She is willing to give up a world of love if it means she can avoid a world of hurt.

If you want a little taste of the difference between normal awareness and hyperawareness, scrape your knuckles against a cheese grater, then pour lemon juice on the cuts. Ordinarily, your skin protects those nerves. A brain that is functioning normally is similarly protected. But for the hyperaware brain, there is no protection, no barrier between it and the world. Everything—every tiny noise and every innocent touch on the shoulder—is like lemon juice in a cut. You can’t ignore it. It all hurts. It all might mean something, and what it probably means is that you are in danger.

Sleep is impossible. It’s hard to concentrate or learn because the brain doesn’t have the opportunity to consolidate any new memories. It’s much too busy dealing with the constant onslaught of data. Lashing out is a natural, if unwarranted, response. Hyperawareness messes with the mind as much as tracker jacker venom.

The environment of fear damages the brains of the tributes—and even the audience watching the events unfold on television. It isn’t accidental. The Games are instruments of terror and control. The lotteries, the lavish preparations for the spectacles, and the catastrophes in the arena are all fine-tuned by the Gamemakers. When we look at the tributes who survive, there can be no question that the long-term ruin of their lives is as deliberate as the uniform height of the flames of an unnatural forest fire.

Self-medicating with alcohol—or “morphling” for that matter—is common among people suffering from PTSD. Alcohol is a depressant that blunts anxiety and fights insomnia. Narcotics have a similar appeal. Haymitch isn’t a drunk because he has plenty of money and nothing better to do. He is a drunk because he lived through a Quarter Quell. He held his own intestines in his hands while he witnessed his would-be murderer brained with an ax. Then, every year for twenty-four years, he has been reminded of that experience, made to relive the helplessness and horror as he watched children from his hometown suffer and die. Haymitch drinks because he has PTSD and has no other way to treat his symptoms. And he isn’t alone.

The Quarter Quell tributes are all suffering from damage done by the Games. Some, like Peeta and Beetee, have obvious physical injuries. The symptoms of PTSD are just as obvious. Disassociation of mind and body, difficulty speaking, anxiety, avoidance, and nightmares—those are injuries caused by traumatic experience. It isn’t a coincidence. The Games are a well-designed instrument of terror, and the lasting damage they inflict on the survivors is one of their most important functions. When the victors return home, they are still a weapon in the Hunger Games. Living tributes, like Haymitch, are “rewarded” with new status and even a new home, and isolated not only by their relative wealth, but because neither they nor anyone else can forget that their fellow tribute did not return. The victors are walking reminders of terrible communal loss. The spectacle may be “entertainment” for the citizens in the Capitol, but it is traumatic for those who live in the districts. They are required to watch, helpless, while their child or friend is murdered on the static-filled screen, and they live with daily reminders of the outcome.

Remember all that brain-building work? The Hunger Games demolish it. They tear down the self, create a physical world where the rules don’t apply, and shred the fabric of social relationships. The participants are, first of all, reclassified—they are “tributes,” not people. The self is disembodied and packaged as an image observed on a television screen. In the arena, the physical world is so manipulated that everything is untrustworthy. Butterflies have poisonous stings, and blood falls in suffocating storms from the sky. Finally, the most fundamental social agreements, like mutual cooperation and the taboo against murder, are violated.

Finnick Odair knows this. As he reveals to Katniss, he, the most beautiful of the living tributes, has been prostituted by President Snow for years. He didn’t choose promiscuity and casual sexual encounters for his own pleasure; he has been sold to the highest bidder. The price for refusing would be the death of the defenseless Annie, the one person Finnick loves. By definition, Finnick has been raped, forced into sexual intercourse against his will. Rape is a traumatic violation and a common cause of PTSD. Dissociation of the mind from the body is a defensive response to it. It allows Finnick to remain functional, rational, apparently in control. But when Annie is in peril during the rebellion, this bargain between mind and body collapses and Finnick disintegrates into the depression, distraction, and difficulty concentrating associated with PTSD.

Another sign of the broken link between mind and body is the loss of meaningful speech seen among the tributes. Unlike the speechlessness of the Avoxes, whose tongues have been cut out as punishment, the strange speech patterns of the Quarter Quell tributes originate in the brain.

Both Annie and Wiress drop out of conversation in midsentence. Annie drifts off and “laughs at odd places in the conversation.” When Annie “does that thing where she covers her ears and exits reality,” it is part of her own pattern of avoidance and disassociation (Mockingjay). Annie lapses in and out of connection when a loud sound or other trigger makes the present as painful as the past. Wiress also has speech problems. Her behavior is different than Annie’s, though. She is easily “distracted by something in her head” or a bit of dry straw (Catching Fire). Beetee acts as her translator. He knows her well enough to finish her unfinished ideas. It probably took years for the two of them to share that sort of connection, but it only takes a few minutes in the bloodbath at the Cornucopia to steal away all of her language but two syllables: “Tick, tock.” It is a heroic effort at communication, one that saves the lives of her allies once they understand her message. It is also clear evidence that her extraordinary, creative, intuitive brain is still struggling to work—“nuts” or no. And then there is Old Mags, whose garbled speech may be the result of a stroke as Katniss speculates, but who might be suffering from aphasia, the inability to recall words. It’s a frustrating aspect of the “swiss-cheese brain” that plagues people with PTSD—they know exactly what they want to say, but the words seem to have been erased. Katniss, for her part, falls completely silent after the death of Prim. She is a mental Avox.

It isn’t the first time that the connection between mind and body has been broken inside Katniss. When she wakes after Rue’s death, basic tasks now require conscious effort and attention. She isn’t exactly herself anymore; instead she is telling some girl named Katniss what to do: “I give myself a series of simple commands to follow, like ‘Now you have to sit up, Katniss. Now you have to drink water, Katniss.’ I act on the orders with slow, robotic motions” (The Hunger Games). Later, when she must watch the highlights of the Games, seeing herself causes Katniss to disassociate again. “Something inside me shuts down and I’m too numb to feel anything. It’s like watching complete strangers in another Hunger Games” (The Hunger Games).

The arena for the Hunger Games is a carefully designed unnatural disaster. Orchestrated wildfires, avalanches, and floods all add to the stress and carnage of the Games. In the arena, the mist that creeps through the jungle at night is nerve gas, and the perfume that rises from the flowers is poisonous. Even gravity is suspended, so a rock thrown over a cliff flies back up, untethered by natural laws. Nothing in the environment is dependable. The earth underfoot can suddenly spin so fast the centrifugal force flings bodies through the air.

The arena is populated with nightmare versions of real animals: fluffy little squirrels are carnivorous pack animals, monkeys have claws like switchblades, and the birds’ songs echo the screams of tortured children. Clearly being dangerous isn’t enough to merit inclusion in the Games. If it were, the arena would be crawling with pit vipers and rattlesnakes. Psychological horror is as important as poison. A pack of wild dogs can kill you, but a muttation that stares at you with the beautiful emerald eyes of a dead girl? Worse. Much worse.

There is no safe place. Fear is constant, and, in response, the brain shifts to a hyper-aroused state and gets stuck there. As Peeta says, “The pink sky and the monsters in the jungle and the tributes who want your blood become your final reality” (Mockingjay ). When that happens, it is very difficult to trust the world ever again. The whole world is the arena. Even if gravity is reliable and “the Games” are over, the brain has been taught that safety and security are illusions.

This experiment reveals how quickly a brain recognizes a difference between “good” and “bad” behaviors and how deeply we desire to be allies with “helpers.”

Consider what that means in the arena. Alliances form, but they must dissolve because, as Maysilee Donner tells Haymitch, “I don’t want it to come down to you and me.” The Games are designed that way, designed to push the tributes to cross the line from ally to murderer.

How did that line come to exist? Why are most humans so reluctant to kill another human being? What is the real difference between killing a deer or squirrel and “murder” from the brain’s perspective?

Some of it may be instinctive; most mammals exhibit a resistance to killing members of their own species. (There are exceptions to the rule—usually triggered by hunger or the desire to reproduce.) The reluctance to kill other humans might also be a result of socialization, part of the whole package of learning to depend on others as an infant. Whatever the origins, the evidence that killing takes a psychological toll is clear. The most obvious data comes from a study done of soldiers who had all lived through war. Even though all members of the group shared similar experiences of threat to life and witnessing deaths of others, those who knew that they had killed another human being during battle were far more likely to develop symptoms of PTSD. The brain finds killing another human being traumatic.²¹

In fact, overcoming the resistance to kill other humans is one of the primary functions of military training. Simulations and other preparation that help a soldier react quickly and pull the trigger rather than hesitate are an advantage on the battlefield. Similarly, the Career tributes step into the arena with an edge over the others. Their greater physical training plays a minor role compared to the power of the psychological training that makes them willing to be the aggressors.

Sometimes training works too well. Titus, a tribute from District 2, got over the taboo against murder and became good at killing. Then he turned cannibal. That was too much for the Capitol—and the home audience—to accept. Titus was wiped out of the game with a well-timed avalanche. The line that can’t be crossed is very subtle. It is, apparently, socially acceptable for Enobaria to tear out another tribute’s throat with her teeth—teeth she later has sharpened and inlaid with gold—but actually eating the flesh of the dead is forbidden.

Katniss, the hunter, has had more experience with death than most. She knows how to kill. She also knows that there is a difference between hunting and murder. Despite having a weapon and expertise, she avoids directly taking a life as long as she can. Only after Rue is attacked does Katniss shoot the boy from District 1. Later Katniss’ brain replays the events and she considers what it means. He was her first kill, the first person she knew would die because that is what she intended. The act of launching the arrow is not much different than the many times she has done it while hunting, but she knows a truth about murder, about killing another human being. She knows what Peeta says later, “It costs everything you are” (Mockingjay). Katniss draws the bowstring back. The arrow finds its mark. The boy from District 1 is dead, and even though Katniss doesn’t know why she should care about that boy, when her brain replays the events of the day she sees not only Rue’s death over and over again, she also sees her arrow piercing the boy’s neck. She thinks about his family, weeping for him. She wonders if he had a girlfriend who loved him and hoped he would return. No matter what the circumstances, killing that boy is difficult for Katniss’ brain to accept. Whether her reaction is rooted in instinct or culture, the result is significant trauma.

Even in this imaginary future, it is easier to break than it is to mend. The Capitol has the technical ability to poison a mind with traumatic, false memories. That is how they hijacked Peeta and turned him into a weapon to use against Katniss. The opposite treatment, the ability to remove a painful memory with chemical or technical means, doesn’t seem to be part of the medical knowledge in the Hunger Games world. Peeta has to sort through his memories, both false and true and decide what to believe.

In the here and now, we are still trying to crack the puzzle of PTSD. Recently, researchers at Johns Hopkins announced that they could erase traumatic memories by removing a protein from the brain—in mice.²² That’s huge, but it doesn’t help Peeta or Katniss or any real-world sufferers of PTSD. We are very far away from having an easy fix for the problem.

So how can what is broken be mended? Can Katniss recover from the damage done? The short answer is that she will never be the same. She will never be the person she might have been if she hadn’t been traumatized. The stress, the loss, the shock: There is no undoing that, just as there is no way to save Prim or Rue. Katniss may always struggle with nightmares. A trigger might surprise her and set off a memory she wants to forget. But it is possible to move forward, and Katniss is doing that as well as she is able.

Peeta shows us one path to recovery: He paints. He recreates the scenes of horror that haunt his dreams. It may seem contradictory to focus on those images instead of trying to ignore them. Katniss certainly feels that way when she says, “All I do is go around trying to forget the arena and you’ve brought it back to life” (Catching Fire). Still, Peeta really is on to something. His own nightmares haven’t stopped, but when he holds the brush in his hand, when he paints, he is in control of the images. He may not erase them from his memory, but he can tell his story through painting. He’s working through the process of moving those images from the place in his brain devoted to emotion—particularly fear—and shifting them to other places of his brain. It doesn’t happen fast, but his paintings are a way to move forward. Expressing the story is an opportunity to reshape reality, to rebuild it. The hand holding the brush does what the brain wants. Mind and body grow back together. Once the memory is shifted out of the place of fear, it is less likely to escape and intrude into every waking moment.

Most of the progress is a small comfort, like the bit of rope that passes from Finnick to Katniss to Peeta. The key is to focus on this moment, the present. It may be nothing more than a distraction at first, that bit of rope, but it is so dependable. It is there. It is real. And it helps. Your favorite color is green and mine is orange. You always tie your shoelaces in a double knot. Those are the tiny things that are real. Knowing those little truths is a place to start to build the world over again—and relearn how to trust it.

Memory triggers become less dangerous. A primrose can be planted as an intentional reminder, a memorial. Dandelions bloom where fire blackened everything. Good memories are like that, small and persistent. That’s why Katniss gives her attention to every act of goodness she has seen. She really is like the mockingjay. In the past she was an instrument, a weapon in a war, but life is finding a way forward in her. It’s a long way back, but in a safe place, with a few people who love her without demanding heroics, she is finally able to trust the world enough to have children and make the book that remembers all the things that should not be forgotten. She’s imagining a future. That takes more courage than being a girl on fire.