Suppressing traumatic memories can cause amnesia, research suggests

The Guardian:

Suppressing bad memories from the past can block memory formation in the here and now, research suggests.

The study could help to explain why those suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other psychological conditions often experience difficulty in remembering recent events, scientists say.

Writing in Nature Communications, the authors describe how trying to forget past incidents by suppressing our recollections can create a “virtual lesion” in the brain that casts an “amnesiac shadow” over the formation of new memories. “If you are motivated to try to prevent yourself from reliving a flashback of that initial trauma, anything that you experience around the period of time of suppression tends to get sucked up into this black hole as well,” Dr Justin Hulbert, one of the study’s authors, told the Guardian.

“I think it makes perfect sense because we know that people with a wide range of psychological problems have difficulties with their everyday memories for ordinary events,” said Professor Chris Brewin, an expert in PTSD from University College, London, who was not involved in the study. “Potentially this could account for the memory deficits we find in depression and other disorders too.”

Read the whole story: The Guardian