The human brain processes traumatic memories as present experiences – study
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At the heart of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a mental disorder that can appear after a traumatic event, are memories that cannot be controlled.
Traumatic memories are processed by the brain differently than just sad memories, according to an article by a group of researchers from Yale University and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai (USA), published in the journal Nature Neuroscience, writes The New York Times.
The team monitored the brain activity of 28 people with PTSD as they listened to audio recordings of their memories. The memories were of three types: traumatic causing PTSD, sad but non-traumatic, and neutral.
As the researchers report, brain scans revealed clear differences between the perception of simply sad and traumatic memories.
| Photo: Andreus/Depositphotos |
People who listened to sad memories, often related to the death of a family member, showed consistently high activity in the hippocampus, a region of the brain that plays an important role in forming and remembering everyday memories, along with their emotional aspects.
But with traumatic memories – of sexual assault, fires, school shootings and terrorist attacks – the hippocampus was not involved.
“This tells us that the brain is in a different state in these two memories“, says Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and one of the authors of the study.
As scientists have discovered, traumatic memories activate another part of the brain – the posterior cingulate cortex, which is usually responsible for inwardly directed thinking, such as introspection or dreams.
The more severe the PTSD symptoms, the greater the activity in the posterior cingulate cortex.
“The PTSD brain doesn’t look like it’s in a state of memory, it looks like it’s in a state of present experience“, says Schiller.
According to her, it is striking that the posterior cingulate cortex is not called the memory area, but the area that deals with “processing of internal experience.”
Schiller noted that PTSD therapy often aims to help people organize their memory so that they can view it as distant from the present.
One of the authors of the article, Dr. Ilan Harpaz-Rotem, notes that traumatic memories are not experienced by the brain like ordinary memories. This finding suggests that in people with PTSD, the brain processes traumatic events not as memories, but as current experiences.
According to him, these data indicate that recollection is a critical element of treatment.
“You help the patient build a memory that can be fixed in the hippocampus. Ideally, such treatments can help transform traumatic memories into ones that more closely resemble normal sad memories. If I can access a memory, I know it’s a memory. I know it’s not happening to me right now“, says Harpaz-Rotem.
Dr. Ruth Lanius, director of PTSD research at the University of Western Ontario, who was not involved in the study, called its findings “fundamental.”
“A soldier, hearing fireworks, can run and hide in a shelter. Traumatic memories are not forgotten, they are relived”– says Lanius.
Doctors can use the findings to treat patients who “don’t feel like the trauma is over,” she said, using therapies that “recontextualize so that the person is aware that it happened in the past.”
According to Brian Marks, associate director of the Division of Behavioral Sciences at the National PTSD Center, if scientists can find biological markers for diagnosing PTSD, it will be a “major scientific breakthrough.”
Dr. Marks called the new study “intriguing” but not conclusive, noting that it did not include a comparison group of subjects without a diagnosis of PTSD, did not specify how long ago the traumatic events occurred, and did not indicate whether the subjects received psychotherapy.
We will remind you that the Ministry of Health of Ukraine debunked the most common myths about PTSD.
And scientists have established a genetic link between suicide attempts and factors that affect physical and psychological health.
Read also: Psychologist Lyudmila Mova: “Not everyone will have PTSD, but we will be in a space where there are many people with PTSD”
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