-Caveat Lector- Hi ! Below please find an article from Bessel A. van der kolk pertaining to memory and PTSD. Sincerely, Neil Brick excerpts from http://www.trauma-pages.com/vanderk4.htm THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE: Memory and the evolving psychobiology of post traumatic stress by Bessel van der Kolk, Bessel A. van der Kolk, MD. , Harvard Medical School, HRI Trauma Center, 227 Babcock Street, Boston, MA 02146 David Baldwin's Trauma Information Pages http://www.trauma-pages.com/ Eugene, Oregon USA (541) 686 2598 For more than a century, ever since people's responses to overwhelming experiences were first systematically explored, it has been noted that the psychological effects of trauma are expressed as changes in the biological stress response. In 1889, Pierre Janet (1), postulated that intense emotional reactions make events traumatic by interfering with the integration of the experience into existing memory schemes. Intense emotions, Janet thought, cause memories of particular events to be dissociated from consciousness, and to be stored, instead, as visceral sensations (anxiety and panic), or as visual images (nightmares and flashbacks). Janet also observed that traumatized patients seemed to react to reminders of the trauma with emergency responses that had been relevant to the original threat, but that had no bearing on current experience. He noted that victims had trouble learning from experience: unable to put the trauma behind them, their energies were absorbed by keeping their emotions under control at the expense of paying attention to current exigencies. They became fixated upon the past, in some cases by being obsessed with the trauma, but more often by behaving and feeling like they were traumatized over and over again without being able to locate the origins of these feelings (2,3). One hundred years ago, Pierre Janet (1) suggested that the most fundamental of mental activities is the storage and categorization of incoming sensations into memory, and the retrieval of those memories under appropriate circumstances. He, like contemporary memory researchers, understood that what is now called semantic, or declarative, memory is an active and constructive process and that remembering depends on existing mental schemata (3,80): once an event or a particular bit of information is integrated into existing mental schemes, it will no longer be accessible as a separate, immutable entity, but be distorted both by prior experience, and by the emotional state at the time of recall(3). PTSD, by definition, is accompanied by memory disturbances, consisting of both hypermnesias and amnesias (9,10). Research into the nature of traumatic memories (3) indicates that trauma interferes with delarative memory, i.e. conscious recall of experience, but does not inhibit implicit, or non-declarative memory, the memory system that controls conditioned emotional responses, skills and habits, and sensorimotor sensations related to experience. There now is enough information available about the biology of memory storage and retrieval to start building coherent hypotheses regarding the underlying psychobiological processes involved in these memory disturbances (3,16,17,25). Janet already noted that: "certain happenings ... leave indelible and distressing memories-- memories to which the sufferer continually returns, and by which he is tormented by day and by night" (81). Clinicians and researchers dealing with traumatized patients have repeatedly made the observation that the sensory experiences and visual images related to the trauma seem not to fade over time, and appear to be less subject to distortion than ordinary experiences (1,49,82). When people are traumatized, they are said to experience "speechless terror": the emotional impact of the event may interfere with the capacity to capture the experience in words or symbols. Piaget (83) thought that under such circumstances, failure of semantic memory leads to the organization of memory on a somatosensory or iconic level (such as somatic sensations, behavioral enactments, nightmares and flashbacks). He pointed out: "It is precisely because there is no immediate accommodation that there is complete dissociation of the inner activity from the external world. As the external world is solely represented by images, it is assimilated without resistance (i.e. unattached to other memories) to the unconscious ego". Physiological arousal in general can trigger trauma-related memories, while, conversely, trauma-related memories precipitate generalized physiological arousal. It is likely that the frequent re-living of a traumatic event in flashbacks or nightmares cause a re-release of stress hormones which further kindle the strength of the memory trace (46). Such a positive feedback loop could cause subclinical PTSD to escalate into clinical PTSD (16), in which the strength of the memories appear so deeply engraved that Pitman and Orr (17) have called it "the Black Hole" in the mental life of the PTSD patient, that attracts all associations to it, and saps current life of its significance. In animals, high level stimulation of the amygdala interferes with hippocampal functioning (107, 109). This implies that intense affect may inhibit proper evaluation and categorization of experience. In mature animals one-time intense stimulation of the amygdala will produce lasting changes in neuronal excitability and enduring behavioral changes in the direction of either fight or flight (118) DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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