Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 441

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Body Keeps Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma," by Bessel Van Der Kolk.

Research from these new disciplines has revealed that trauma produces actual physiological changes, including a recalibration of the brain’s alarm system, an increase in stress hormone activity, and alterations in the system that filters relevant information from irrelevant. We now know that trauma compromises the brain area that communicates the physical, embodied feeling of being alive. These changes explain why traumatized individuals become hypervigilant to threat at the expense of spontaneously engaging in their day-to-day lives. They also help us understand why traumatized people so often keep repeating the same problems and have such trouble learning from experience. We now know that their behaviors are not the result of moral failings or signs of lack of willpower or bad character—they are caused by actual changes in the brain.



Our most surprising finding was a white spot in the left frontal lobe of the cortex, in a region called Broca’s area. In this case the change in color meant that there was a significant decrease in that part of the brain. Broca’s area is one of the speech centers of the brain, which is often affected in stroke patients when the blood supply to that region is cut off. Without a functioning Broca’s area, you cannot put your thoughts and feelings into words. Our scans showed that Broca’s area went offline whenever a flashback was triggered. In other words, we had visual proof that the effects of trauma are not necessarily different from—and can overlap with—the effects of physical lesions like strokes. All trauma is preverbal.

 

In 1922 the British government issued the Southborough Report, whose goal was to prevent the diagnosis of shell shock in any future wars and to undermine any more claims for compensation. It suggested the elimination of shell shock from all official nomenclature and insisted that these cases should no more be classified “as a battle casualty than sickness or disease is so regarded.” The official view was that well-trained troops, properly led, would not suffer from shell shock and that the servicemen who had succumbed to the disorder were
undisciplined and unwilling soldiers. While the political storm about the legitimacy of shell shock continued to rage for several more years, reports on how to best treat these cases disappeared from the scientific literature.

 In the United States the fate of veterans was also fraught with problems. In 1918, when they returned home from the battlefields of France and Flanders, they had been welcomed as national heroes, just as the soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan are today. In 1924 Congress voted to award them a bonus of $1.25 for each day they had served overseas, but disbursement was postponed until 1945.

By 1932 the nation was in the middle of the Great Depression, and in May of that year about fifteen thousand unemployed and penniless veterans camped on the Mall in Washington DC to petition for immediate payment of their bonuses. The Senate defeated the bill to move up disbursement by a vote of sixty-two to eighteen. A month later President Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans’ encampment. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur
commanded the troops, supported by six tanks. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was the liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton was in charge of the cavalry. Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas into the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames. The veterans never received their pensions.

 

In the “normal” group key parts of the brain worked together to produce a coherent pattern of filtering, focus, and analysis. In contrast, the brain waves of traumatized subjects were more loosely coordinated and failed to come together into a coherent pattern. Specifically, they did not generate the brainwave pattern that helps people pay attention on the task at
hand by filtering out irrelevant information. In addition, the core information-processing configuration of the brain was poorly defined; the depth of the wave determines how well we are able to take in and analyze new data. This was important new information about how traumatized people process nontraumatic information that has profound implications for understanding day-to-day information processing. These brainwave patterns could explain why so many traumatized people have trouble learning from experience and fully engaging in their daily lives. Their brains are not organized to pay careful attention to what is going on in the present moment.