James Hopper, Ph.D., is an independent consultant and Instructor in Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Such is the nature of terrifying experiences, and it is a nature that we cannot ignore. They will remember other aspects not at all, or only in jumbled and confused fragments. Indeed, they may spend decades trying to forget them. They will remember some aspects of the experience in exquisitely painful detail. It is not reasonable to expect a trauma survivor – whether a rape victim, a police officer or a soldier – to recall traumatic events the way they would recall their wedding day. These advances in our understanding of the impact of trauma on the brain have enormous implications for the criminal justice system. Fear also impairs its ability to encode time sequencing information, like whether the perpetrator ripped off a shirt before or after saying “you want this.” Fear impairs the ability of the hippocampus to encode and store “contextual information,” like the layout of the room where the rape happened. The hippocampus encodes experiences into short-term memory and can store them as long-term memories. The brain’s fear circuitry also alters the functioning of a third key brain area, the hippocampus. And what gets attention is what is most likely to get encoded into memory. Either way, what gets attention tends to be fragmentary sensations, not the many different elements of the unfolding assault. Or, the fear circuitry can direct attention away from the horrible sensations of sexual assault by focusing attention on otherwise meaningless details. It could be the sound of incoming mortars or the cold facial expression of a predatory rapist or the grip of his hand on one’s neck. Once the fear circuitry takes over, it – not the prefrontal cortex – controls where attention goes. When it does, it is no longer the prefrontal cortex running the show, but the brain’s fear circuitry – especially the amygdala. Inevitably, at some point during a traumatic experience, fear kicks in. When the executive center of the our brain goes offline, we are less able to willfully control what we pay attention to, less able to make sense of what we are experiencing, and therefore less able to recall our experience in an orderly way. Most of us have probably had the experience of being suddenly confronted by an emergency, one that demands some kind of clear thinking, and finding that precisely when we need our brain to work at its best, it seems to become bogged down and unresponsive. But in states of high stress, fear or terror like combat and sexual assault, the prefrontal cortex is impaired – sometimes even effectively shut down – by a surge of stress chemicals. You are using your prefrontal cortex right now to read this article and absorb what we’ve written, rather than getting distracted by other thoughts in your head or things going on around you. This part of our brain is responsible for “executive functions,” including focusing attention where we choose, rational thought processes and inhibiting impulses. But in our training of police investigators, prosecutors, judges, university administrators and military commanders, we’ve found that it’s helpful to share what’s known about how traumatic experiences affect the functioning of three key brain regions.įirst, let’s consider the prefrontal cortex. We cannot comment on that particular and clearly complex case without knowing the facts. Last week, Rolling Stone issued a note about their story of a gang rape at the University of Virginia after reports surfaced of discrepancies in the victim’s accounting.
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