While slowly wrapping his hands before practice one morning last week at American Top Team, UFC heavyweight Shawn Jordan explained the experience of a professional MMA fight in terms any video game enthusiast could understand.

“For the first couple minutes, you’re still holding the controller,” Jordan said. “After that …”

Here, he trailed off and gave a shrug of his massive shoulders. It got the point across.

What got Jordan on the topic in the first place was the same thing that got Krzysztof Soszynski to call it a career recently: memory loss. Specifically, the type of memory loss that occurs when you’ve been hit in the head really hard.

Most of his fights were kind of a blur to begin with, Jordan explained. He didn’t always feel fully in control of what he was doing, especially after those first couple of minutes. That, he said, “is probably why you have to train this stuff so much.” Your body needs to know what to do without much guidance from your conscious mind. If things don’t go your way, your conscious mind might not even know there ever was a fight.

That’s how it was for one of Jordan’s losses, he said. When a single right hand to the jaw from Mark Holata knocked him cold in a Bellator fight, he went home with a missing chunk of time that began somewhere before his walkout and extended all the way to his return to the locker room. Everything in between was forever lost to him. When he got knocked out by Gabriel Gonzaga at UFC 166, on the other hand, he remembered everything right up until Gonzaga landed that deciding blow.

“It was one of those things where we both saw the opening and it was just who could move first,” said Jordan, who won by TKO against Jack May this past Saturday at UFC Fight Night 47. “I just remember thinking, ‘Oh s–t, oh s–t, oh s–t.’ Then I woke up in the locker room.”

As strange as it sounds, it’s a more common phenomenon among fighters than you might expect. Yves Edwards tells a story of sitting in his locker room before his fight with Sam Stout at UFC 131, and having a bizarre waking dream in which Stout came in to shake his hand before the fight. His wife was there, too. So were his coaches. They all stood around and talked. That’s how he knew it had to be a dream, because stuff like that just didn’t happen in the locker room before a fight. It was only when Edwards started asking questions that he realized the fight was already over and and he’d been knocked out cold in a finish that UFC President Dana White later called “one of the nastiest I’ve ever seen.”

Edwards had no recollection of it. For him, it was almost like it didn’t exist.

These are scary things to think about for most of us. They’re also a pretty normal part of the job for people who trade punches and kicks and knees and elbows for a living. Even winning fighters will tell you that they don’t remember much, if anything, about their own performances. Some of that is the adrenaline, the blur of a fast-paced, high-stakes competition. Other times it’s something different, something reminding us that lives don’t stop when the highlight reel does.

The consequences of repeated brain trauma are something we like to think we understand pretty well these days. The same goes for the risks of competing in a sport in which that sort of trauma is a form of currency. Like White said when talking to reporters in Maine this past weekend, this isn’t exactly news in combat sports.

“Show me a guy that ever said getting punched in the face was good for you,” White told MMAjunkie. “It’s not. This isn’t like some football situation where people thought they were wearing helmets and being protected. This is a combat sport. It’s rough. People know what they’re getting into here.”

Then again, very few fighters get into it thinking they’re going to be the one who gets knocked out. As famed MMA trainer Greg Jackson likes to say, “Fighters have to be optimists.” It’s another way of saying that they have to not be pessimists, or even realists, which probably makes it hard to think about how it’s going to feel to wake up in the locker room one night with no idea how you got there.

It happens. It’ll keep happening. It’s part of the sport. Some things, like what Gonzaga’s fist looks like as it closes in on your skull, you might be better off forgetting. But take too many of those and you might find that you start losing some memories you’d really prefer to keep.

For more on the UFC’s upcoming schedule, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.