We’ve known for decades that traumatic experience changes people’s brains, but not the details of where and what the brain changes are.
Now, research done by Bessel van der Kolk, MD., one of today’s premier experts on the effects of trauma, gives us a better understanding of how the brain reacts to extreme circumstance.
Three Specific Changes
There are three noteworthy ways, according to van der Kolk, that distressing experience changes the human brain:
- One change takes place in the brain’s most primitive section. This area, responsible for overseeing the body’s well being, becomes driven by fear after traumatic experience, increasing a person’s perception of threat. To those with a heightened threat perception, situations most people view as manageable can appear dangerous.
- The second change happens higher in the brain, in a section that works like a filter. The filter lets sensory information useful to the current situation enter our awareness, and filters out irrelevant sensory data. If a traumatic event disturbs this filtering apparatus, a person may be attentive to information that others naturally ignore. This makes focusing on what is helpful and relevant in everyday situations problematic and distressing.
- The third change happens down the brain’s midline, an area that provides us with a sense of self. To protect people from the terror and pain associated with trauma, this sense-of-self part of the brain may dampen down or go numb. Unfortunately, this also protects people from a positive experience of self, such as feelings of pleasure, intimacy, and excitement.
It is plain to see that many PTSD symptoms - being easily startled, hyper-vigilance, feeling disconnected, on edge, emotionally flat, and having disturbing thoughts - reflect the brain alterations van der Kolk describes.
What researchers such as van der Kolk hope is that understanding specifically how the brain responds to trauma will lead to more efficacious treatment relief for those with PTSD.
Source: nicabm
Photo credit: A Health Blog
