The fact that people without PTSD store those memories in a verbal region of the brain may also explain why they typically recall the memories as narratives, and don't repeatedly relive the experience, she added. For people with PTSD, traumatic memories are 'timeless,' as if they were happening 'over and over again,' Lanius said. These differences, reported in the American Journal of Psychiatry, may explain why traumatic memories recur so viscerally in people with PTSD, who often say they experience flashbacks of events during which they see, feel, and smell the same things that occurred before, she noted. In contrast, people without the condition showed much higher levels of activity in the left front of the brain, a region associated with storing verbal memories, such as the narrative of a past event, explained Lanius, who is also based at Robarts Research Institute in Ontario. Specifically, people with PTSD showed a high level of activity in the right back region of the brain, which is associated with non-verbal memories, such as the sights, sounds, and smells associated with a past event. Looking at the scans, Lanius said she and her team saw that 'completely different regions' of the brain were activated when people with and without PTSD recalled traumatic events. The researchers then read the narrative to participants and asked them to recall the memory while they underwent brain scans. Other common symptoms of PTSD include anxiety, insomnia, jumpiness, and irritability.ĭuring the study, Lanius and her colleagues asked 11 people with PTSD and 13 others to write a description of a particularly traumatic event. She added that the more researchers understand why some people develop PTSD and others don't, the better they will be able to help people escape the continual reliving of traumatic memories. Ruth Lanius of the University of Western Ontario in Canada told Reuters Health. The fact that people with PTSD store their traumatic memories in a different region of the brain may be 'part of the cause of why these memories are experienced so differently,' Dr. In contrast, people without PTSD are just as likely to experience and remember traumatic events, but are not haunted by their memories in the same way, the lead author of the study explained in an interview.

One of the hallmarks of PTSD is recurrent flashbacks of traumatic events, during which people relive the experience in vivid images. The finding may explain why PTSD sufferers can be haunted by those memories for years on end. While these may be effective in the short run, we can assume in this increasingly open and transparent world, that someone will find out someday, and probably sooner than later-and trust is broken.NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - People with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) appear to store traumatic memories in a different part of their brains than others, a brain study shows.

While this should be easy and natural, it is surprising to see how many organizations and leaders find this difficult, or even deliberately create one or more gaps because they think they have to.Įxamples are greenwashing, over-selling, and pretending. The key lesson is as simple as it is powerful: be authentic in whatever you say and do. If you do this, people who see this will assume you are pretending in one case or even in both. Engagement gap: behave differently internally than externally. If you do this, customers will feel mistreated, will walk away, or will complain.Ĥ. Experience gap: tell the world something else than you actually do, and vice versa. If you do this, you undermine what you say and people will have a hard time believing you next time.ģ. Leadership gap: don’t act in line with what you tell your employees. If you do this, people don’t know anymore which of the two to believe or act upon.Ģ. Message gap: say something else to your employees than to the rest of the world. Avoid all four and you’re ahead of most competitors.ġ. There are four easy ways to break it and lose it. Trust is key for every organization, both internally and in the market.

We have relive images painful memories