From: Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
Date: Tue Nov 17 1998 - 06:05:48 MST
patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au (Patrick Wilken) writes:
> >I regret that the human emotional system seems to be designed so that high
> >levels of stress are needed to really grow up.
>
> Well you better get that level of stress just right: the recent Society for
> Neuroscience meeting suggests that childhood abuse (emotional not physical)
> may lead to permenant brain damage:
>
> http://biomednet.com/biomednews/conf/sfn98/Monday/story_2.html
It is interesting, but I'm not completely buying just this
article. What the article seems to say is that psychological abuse
causes changes in mental state and brain activiation similar to
temporal lobe epilepsy. This is another good reason to limit
psychological abuse, of course, but what isn't shown is that there is
structural damage, just functional damage. The difference is small,
but relevant when it comes to repairing it.
However, I'm actually quite convinced that abuse can produce even
structural damage, a lot of data seems to point in that direction. For
example, it is well known that high levels of stress hormones
(especially the corticoids) damages or kills cells in the hippocampus;
it wouldn't be surprising if this would lead to decreases in memory or
attention capacity for victims of abuse or a stressful upbringing.
-- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Anders Sandberg Towards Ascension! asa@nada.kth.se http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/ GCS/M/S/O d++ -p+ c++++ !l u+ e++ m++ s+/+ n--- h+/* f+ g+ w++ t+ r+ !y
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