Scars in Our Brains

As anyone who has lived through a rough childhood can tell you, our brains remember much more than we realize they do. Learn more about some of the recent research into this area in this fascinating article from National Public Radio.

Childhood Maltreatment Can Leave Scars in the Brain
by Jon Hamilton, NPR Health News

Brain scans of teenagers revealed weaker connections between the prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus in both boys and girls who had been maltreated as children, a team from the University of Wisconsin reports in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Girls who had been maltreated also had relatively weak connections between the prefrontal cortex the amygdala.

Those weaker connections "actually mediated or led to the development of anxiety and depressive symptoms by late adolescence," says Ryan Herringa, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin and one of the study's authors.

Maltreatment can be physical or emotional, and it ranges from mild to severe. So the researchers asked a group of 64 fairly typical 18-year-olds to answer a questionnaire designed to assess childhood trauma. The teens are part of a larger study that has been tracking children's social and emotional development in more than 500 families since 1994.

Read the entire article at http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/11/04/242945454/childhood-maltreatment-can-leave-scars-in-the-brain>>