The PTSD Trap: Our Overdiagnosis of PTSD In Vets Is Enough to Make You Sick

David Dobbs:...When PTSD was first added to the DSM-III in 1980, traumatic memories were considered reasonably faithful recordings of actual events. But as research since then has repeatedly shown, memory is spectacularly unreliable and extraordinarily malleable. We routinely add or subtract people, details, settings, and actions to our memories. We conflate, invent, and edit... ...to make PTSD diagnosis more rigorous, some have suggested that blood chemistry, brain imaging or other tests might be able to detect physiological signatures of PTSD. Studies of stress hormones in groups of PTSD patients show differences from normal subjects, but the overlap between the normal and the PTSD groups is huge, making individual profiles useless for diagnostics. Brain imaging has similar limitations, with the abnormal dynamics in PTSD heavily overlapping those of depression and anxiety... ...With memory unreliable and biological markers elusive, diagnosis depends on clinical symptoms. But as a 2007 study showed starkly, PTSD’s symptom profile is as slippery as the would-be biomarkers... More

Why unhappy brains are better brains

David DiSalvo in his book What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite. That is are our predisposition to focus on or select the pieces of information that 'confirm' our opinion (of a person, a topic, anything) and disregard anything to the contrary.Since our brains like being happy, we like feeling right. DiSalvo:...Our need to be right is actually a need to "feel" right...In our everyday lives, though, feeling right translates into being right (because if we could admit that we only 'feel' right, then we might not really be right, and from our brains' point of view that's just not alright)...The brain doesn't merely prefer certainty over ambiguity...It craves it... In the book David DiSalvo cites a 2005 study conducted by psychologist Ming Hsu which found that even a small amount of ambiguity triggers increased activity in the amygdalae - brain clusters that relate to threat. The effect of our brains' natural inclinations, and how it can lead us to errors, biases, and distortions, is what he explores in his book. He also provides strategies for overcoming these limitations.

Personality Traits Traced in Brain

Berman, Drs. Mbemda Jabbi, Shane Kippenham, and colleagues, report on their imaging study in Williams syndrome online in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Thomas R. Insel, M.D., NIMH Director ...This line of research offers insight into how genes help to shape brain circuitry that regulates complex behaviors – such as the way a person responds to others – and thus holds promise for unraveling brain mechanisms in other disorders of social behavior...

Long distance connections, white matter, between the insula and other parts of the brain are aberrant in Williams syndrome. Neuronal fibers of normal controls (left) extend further than those of Williams syndrome patients (right). Picture shows diffusion tensor imaging data from each patient superimposed on anatomical MRI of the median patient. (Source: Karen Berman, M.D., NIMH Clinical Brain Disorders Branch)

Axon Game

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Evidence Builds That Meditation Strengthens the Brain

Earlier evidence out of UCLA suggested that meditating for years thickens the brain and strengthens the connections between brain cells. Now a direct correlation was found between the amount of gyrification and the number of meditation years, possibly providing further proof of the brain's neuroplasticity, or ability to adapt to environmental changes.

Eileen Luders, Florian Kurth, Emeran A. Mayer, Arthur W. Toga, Katherine L. Narr, Christian Gaser. The Unique Brain Anatomy of Meditation Practitioners: Alterations in Cortical Gyrification. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 2012

Regular exercise cures depression-like behavior...

Regular exercise cures depression-like behavior via VEGF-Flk-1 signaling in chronically stressed mice

Flu Drug Speeds Traumatic Brain Injury Recovery

A multi-national study published Feb. 29 in the New England Journal of Medicine revealed a significant breakthrough in the treatment of patients in vegetative and minimally conscious states. The study showed that the influenza medication amantadine hydrochloride accelerated the pace of functional recovery during active treatment in patients with post-traumatic disorders of consciousness. Multi-National Clinical Trial Shows Effectiveness of Amantadine in Treatment of Traumatic Brain Injury