An analysis of brain activity in patients with post-traumatic stress disorder has found that the brain processes traumatic memories associated with PTSD differently than regular memories — a finding that could explain why PTSD trauma recollections feel so intrusive.
A small study published Thursday in Nature Neuroscience looked at the brain activity of 28 patients with PTSD and found, as researchers triggered the patients' memories, that PTSD trauma manifested itself in a different part of the brain than the section usually associated with memory storage and recall.
The section of the brain activated when reexperiencing a traumatic event, the posterior cingulate cortex, is known for acting as a person's inner monologue and is involved in self-talk and introspection, according to Daniela Schiller, a researcher with the Center for Computational Psychiatry, part of the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York.
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Regular sad memories, Schiller said, are processed in the hippocampus, as seen on patient brain scans known as functional magnetic resonance imaging.
“We notice there are two states of the brain: one when it is retrieving a traumatic memory and one for regular memories. And … there is something different — maybe [the traumatic memory] is not even a memory, it's more like a…
