THE ESSENTIAL
- In another recent study, Suarez-Jimenez and colleagues found that patients with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) have more difficulty distinguishing circles of different sizes when an emotion is triggered by a threat.
- People with PTSD had less signal between the hippocampus (an area of the brain responsible for emotion and memory) and the salience network (used for learning and survival) and between the amygdala (also related to emotion) and the default mode network.
- “It could be that in the real world, emotions are overloading their cognitive ability to distinguish between safety, danger or reward. This generalizes too much towards danger,” Suarez-Jimenez says.
Exposure to a traumatic event, with all the negative consequences that entails, can change a life. Researchers have found that psychological trauma can go so far as to physically alter the structure of our brain.
The brain seems to rewire itself after a traumatic event
“We are learning more about how people exposed to trauma learn to distinguish between what is safe and what is not. Their brains give us insight into what could go wrong in specific mechanisms who are impacted by exposure to trauma, especially when emotion is involved”said one of the study’s co-authors, Suarez-Jimenez, a professor at Columbia University Irving Medical Center, in a communiqué.
His team’s research, recently published in Communications Biologyidentified changes in the salience network – a brain mechanism used for learning and survival – in people exposed to trauma (with and without psychopathologies, including post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and anxiety ).
Trauma: understanding its effects on the brain to improve treatments
Using an MRI, the researchers recorded activity in the participants’ brains as they looked at circles of varying sizes. A single size was associated with a small shock (or threat). In addition to changes in the salience network, the researchers found another difference within the resilient trauma-exposed group. They found that the brains of people exposed to trauma without psychopathology compensated for changes in their brain processes by engaging the executive control network, one of the brain’s dominant networks.
“We know where a change is happening in the brain and how some people can circumvent that change. It’s a marker of resilience”explains Suarez-Jimenez. “Knowing what to look for in the brain when someone is exposed to trauma could significantly advance treatments”says the researcher.