The Body Remembers, Chapter 2

Operant conditioning

BF Skinner involves shaping behavior through cause and affect or positive and/or negative reinforcement or behavior modification random behavior = reward conditioned behavior = reward

The least complex and least malleable brain structure is the ________.

Brain Stem

A female patient of the early 20th century French physician

Edouard Claparede was unable to create new memories due to brain damage (short term memory loss patient that remembered to remove her hand from being pricked by a tact. Thus, she was able to make new memories just not explicit ones. Her implicit memory was full and intact)

Two Hormone neurotransmitters secreted in response to traumatic stress

Epinephrine and norepinephrine

Both of these are crucial to healthy development:

Healthy Bonding and Attachment

State dependant recall can also occur unbidden

It is not uncommon for a trauma to be recalled into awareness by an internal condition like increased hear rate or respiration or body posture that is reminiscent of the original response to the trauma/\.

classical conditioning

Ivan Pavlov bell (cs) = salvation association with bell (cr) food (s) = salvation association with food (R)

Classical conditioning is especially germane to

PTSD discussion which causes traumatic triggers

Speechless terror

The brochas area, left cortical structure, is suppressed during a traumatic event which is responsible for speech production. There is a loss of speech at sometimes extreme degrees.

Synapse

a junction of two nerve cells (neurons).

short-term memory

ability to remember a phone number, cramming night before exams, and a waiter's face which usually slip quickly from one's grasp to prevent the brain from becoming cluttered.

memory retrieval

accesses the stored information

Epinephrine is secreted by the sympathetic nerves in the ________ _________.

adrenal glands

Well cared for babies become ________

adults with resilience with an ability to adapt and integrate positive and negative experiences.

The body reports back to the brain on internal state and position in space thru synapses connecting to

afferent nerves (body to brain).

The brain's capacity for alteration decreases with __________.

age

1980s and early 1990s the idea of multiple memory systems

became widely accepted

When a traumatic incident is repeated as with physical abuse, domestic violence, torture, or incest

behavioral strategies for coping can become hapituated, closing off the posibility of exercising other options, even in less stressful circumstances. Exp: sexually abused teenager might later be victimized because impulses to protect themselves and protest were extinguished.

Amygdala is mature at

birth

__________ _________ sometimes called the _______ ______ regulates basic bodily functions such as heart rate and respiration

brain stem, reptilian

The most complex, flexible, and easily influenced brain structure is the ___________.

cerebral cortex.

Classical conditioning can create

chains of conditioned stimuli such that an individual trigger (cs) can be several generations away from the original stimulus-response scenario. Ex: the dog who learned to salivate to the sound of a bell could be taught to salivate to a flashing light just by pairing the bell to the light.

A class of implicit memory includes behavior learned through

classical conditioning or operant conditioning

The brain is the ______________ of the nervous system

control center

Feedback from postural proprioceptive nerves

could have the same memory power as the proprioceptive nerves of internal sensation that must be involved in state-dependent recall under the influence of drugs or alcohol (when a physical abused child either freezes or screams when casually or inadvertently tossed over another's knee in play.

Explicit memory is sometimes called

declarative memory

All information coming into the the body and brain through the senses and each response (reflex, behavior, emotion, or thought) is managed by

discrete sets of synapses

forgetting is the result of _________

disuse of synapse strings

The brain regulates all body processes and behaviors through synapses that connect to _____________

efferent nerves (brain to body)

Communication from one cell to the next happens by two ways of

electrical impulse and chemical neurotransmitter

Amygdala facilitates storage of ________ and _________

emotional and sensory

for a piece of information to become a memory it must traverse at least three major steps

encoding, storage, retrieval.

brain stimulation studies

epileptic patients brains were stimulated during surgery, temporary lobe, and patients recorded detailed, sensory memories but seems to be exaggeration as only 10% of patients did this

An important discovery in 1980s and 1990s was two types of memory

explicit and implicit.

PTSD may be caused, in part, when memory of a traumatic event is somehow excluded from

explicit storage

Explicit member is comprised of

facts, concepts, and ideas

thalamus

flanking the limbic system, is the central relay hub for sensory information that come from all points of the body on the way to the cortex.

The brain is __________ and __________ which is crucial to understand dysfunctional emotional patterns like PTSD.

flexible, subject to influence

classical conditioned associations

generation of traumatic triggers can cause increasingly greater degrees of restriction, avoidance, and eventually, debilitation. (Charlie generalized his fear to the type of dog that attached him (CS) to all dogs (second CS)

Cerebral Cortex

higher mental functions including speech thought and semantic/procedural memory

Prolonged cortisol secretion could suppress

hippocampal activity, while the amygdala remains unaffected

Mature and adequate function of both ________ and _______ is necessary for sufficient processing of life events and trauma

hippocampus and amygdala

Two limbic regions that are pertinent to understand traumatic memories and integral to processing information transmitted from the body on the way to the cerebral cortex

hippocampus and amygdala

memory storage

how and for how long that information is kept

At birth, the brain is the most _________ of the body's organs and is similar to a new _______ with basic system requirements.

immature, computer

Traumatic events are more easily recorded in __________ memory because the ________________ does not succumb to the stress hormones that suppress the activity of the hippocampus

implicit, amygdala

When comes to memory of traumatic events, ___________ memories not linked to ____________ memories can be troublesome

implicit, explicit

How the brain first organizes is dependent on ____________.

infant's interaction with its environment

Synapses can be __________ and __________.

influenced and changed, there is nothing fixed.

cognitive memory

involves the linking of the nerves via synapses within the brain.

Explicit memory

is what we usually mean when we use the term "memory"

Long-term memory

it involves items of information that are permanently stored - whether or not they are not they are ever recalled into consciousness.

Classical conditioning helps to clarify how

it is possible to react to a reminder of a traumatic event without recalling that event.

_________ cortex appears to depend on language for processing information with an intimate relationship with the _____________.

left, hippocampus

How the brain grows, develops, and reorganizes is dependent on

life experiences.

1960s, scientists discovery

long-term and short-term memory. there was a finding that short-term memory depended on different brain system other than long-term memory which was the birth of the multiple memory systems which is the norm.

Hypothalamus located in the Limbic system is responsible for

maintaining body temperature, nutrition/hydration, rest, and balance

The higher and more complex the brain structure, the greater its ___________.

malleability

The human brain is _________, __________, _________.

malleable, programmable, and reprogrammable.

New learning is achieved thru

new synapse strings and adaptation of existing ones.

When enough of ____________ is secreted from the sympathetic nerves the body is readied for fight or flight.

norepinephrine

Interaction between the baby and caretaker determines ________ _____ and _______________.

normal brain and nervous system development

traumatic events can shape behavior through

operant conditioning

Positive early experiences are curcial for

optimal organization and development

Explicit memory depends on

oral or written language for the retrieval of explicit memories.

Implicit memory was first called

procedural or non declarative memory

Implicit memory has to do with storage and recall of learned

procedures and behaviors which helps with tasks like bicycle riding as explicitly remember such a process is laboring

Implicit memory by passes language and involves

procedures and internal states that are automatic.

encoding

process of recording or etching information onto the brain

Amygdala

processes and then facilitates the storage of emotions and reactions to emotionally charged events.

hippocampus

processes the data necessary to make sense of those experiences within the time line of personal history and sequence of the experience itself.

memory

recording, storage, and recall of information perceived from the internal and external environment

Explicit memory is not just facts as it also involves

remembering operations by thought and step-by-step narration like baking a cake, telling a story, extracting a meaning, contracting a chronology to recall and recount an event with cohesive narrative.

Somatic memory

requires that sensory nerves be linked via synapses to the brain and then recorded within the brain.

Babies not well cared for lack

resilience as adults and have trouble adapting to life's ebbs and flows thus more vulnerable to psychological disturbances and disorders.

Norepinephrine is secreted by the sympathetic nerves in the ___________.

rest of the body.

__________ cortex appears to play a greater role in the storage of sensory input and sensory information travels thru the the __________ to it

right, amygdala

Hippocampus is mature at

second and third year of life

The brain regulates the body's sensory pathways:

sight (inc. written words), hearing (inc. spoken words), taste, touch, smell, proprioception (spatial and internal states), and vestibular sense (indicates which way is up).

This interferes with the brain's processing of stressful life events.

smaller hippocampus size

Autonomic nervous system regulated by the limbic system mediates

smooth muscle and visceral responses along with fight, flight, and freeze.

The greater the significance, and the higher the emotional change, both positive and negative are more likely to be

stored in our memory

When strategies used to meet a traumatic threat are successful, the become more available and more likely to be used again which is sometimes called

stress inoculation

Some individuals with PTSD recall their traumatic experiences with highly disturbing emotional and sensory states lacking time and space which could be explained by the phenomenon of

surpassed hippocampal activity and a fully functional amygdala

Limbic system is the seat of ________ __________ and _____________

survival instincts, reflexes

through sets of ________, individual thoughts become linked as concepts or tied to specific events

synapses

If the traumatized person remembers the events in precise detail then PTSD persists because

the are unable to make sense of the events or some aspect of them. Maybe plagued w/disturbing body sensations or feel numb or deadness.

Infantile amnesia

the fact that we usually don't consciously remember our infancy linked to hippocampus development.

If the traumatized person has little memory of the events then

they are plagued by physical sensations and emotional reactions that make no sense in the current context.

The caregiver help the child regulate new stimuli

thru touch and sound first and then an interactional pattern forms through face-to-face contact which is believed to be right cortex mediated

State-dependent recall is another important phenomenon related to

traumatic memory. When a current internal state replicates the internal state produced during a previous event, details, moods, information, and other states associated to that event may be spontaneously recalled or set in motion. (Studying and eating chocolate in the same spot each time to pass exam)

Implicit memory operates

unconsciously, unless made conscious thru a bridging to explicit memory that narrates the remembered operation, emotion, sensation, etc.

Brain malleability makes each of us __________.

unique.

40 years ago, memory was thought to be only one thing

we remember or we didn't from long-term memory with forgetting or amnesia. Memory etched on brain's cortex like a video tape and memory was the video tape playback

The brain processes perceptions and stores them as thoughts, emotions, images, sensations, and behavioral impulses

when these stored items are recalled, that is memory