What Happened to You?: Conversations on Trauma, Resilience, and Healing

by Bruce D. Perry

Each biological system in our body has some way to change in response to experience; in a sense, then, that change is a record of past experiences—or, basically, memory. Neurons are exquisitely sensitive to experience, and neural networks in every part of the brain can make memory. Remembering names, phone numbers, and where you left your keys is a function of the neural networks of the cortex. But we also have emotional memories: A song can elicit a feeling, an association with an experience that took place years ago. The smell of roasted turkey or freshly baked bread may elicit a warm sense of belonging, or a melancholy sense of a lost past. These feelings arise from associations stored in the neural networks of the limbic and other brain regions. And there are motor-vestibular memories—curling up in the fetal position is essentially an act of remembering—stored in even lower networks in the brain. But traumatic experience can create complex memory traces that involve all regions of the brain.