Decades of treatment of military veterans and sexual assault survivors have left little doubt that traumatic memories function differently from other memories.
The team conducted brain scans of 28 people with PTSD while they listened to recorded narrations of their own memories.
Some of the recorded memories were neutral, some were simply “sad,” and some were traumatic.
The brain scans found clear differences, the researchers reported in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Nature Neuroscience.
The people listening to the sad memories, which often involved the death of a family member, showed consistently high engagement of the hippocampus, part of the brain that organizes and contextualizes memories.
Organizations:
Yale University, Icahn School of Medicine, Mount, Neuroscience