Child Abuse Never Really Stops

Kids who were abused as children grow up with brains tuned to be hypervigilant - similar changes have been observed in the brains of soldiers. Abused kids have a kind of permanent, low-grade Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder that never really goes away. We have long known that abused kids grow up to be more anxious and depressed, and now we have the brain imaging showing permanent neural rewiring to go with that data.

Don't hit your kids. Just don't.

via SciGuru, Child abuse changes the brain

If Memory Serves

New research on marine snails suggests that science is drawing closer to the day when memories may be erased at will, like something out of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. There's some debate as to whether this could possibly be a good thing - after all, even our worst traumas prove formative and can mold us into wiser, happier people in the long run.

But what about those trapped in the endless nightmare of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Sometimes the mechanisms in the brain for dealing with bad memories become stuck, and we lose our ability to move on.

Memory is more than just a read/write function of the brain though - it's made up of somatic feedback loops and automated responses that arise from the body, not from the mind. I wonder, if we remove the memory, would that necessarily remove the behavior? Or would it perhaps just remove the fulcrum against which we might eventually get some traction to change the out-of-control distress response?

My father died of complications related to senile dementia, and I've watched several other close relatives falter under the gradual erosion of Alzheimer's disease. From my own observations I am unconvinced that memory erasure would bring definitive relief from behavioral problems, but I'm glad to see that we're learning so much about the physical mechanisms involved.

Read more here: Even If We Could Erase Bad Memories, Should We? via TheAtlantic.com