Episode Transcript
Hi, this is Rachel on Recovery here with Dr. Tracy Shores, and she's going to tell us a little bit about herself, and then we're going to answer some questions.
Hi, Rachel. Nice to be with you. Thank you for inviting me to speak about my research and other things. Today. I'm a neuroscientist and distinguished professor at Rutgers University. In New Jersey, I'm
an author of a book I just wrote pretty recently called Everyday Trauma. And I'm also, I have a brain fitness program that I think we'll talk about. Okay. All right, So we're going to get into some questions. How did you choose this as a career?
Huh. That's a long story because I've been around for a while now. I, you know, when you look back on your life, it seems obvious that this would be my my choice of career. But I think, you know, at the time when you're young, you're just kind of just searching, trying to find things that really interest you. And so I was always really interested. In science, my brother's a scientist, my dad's an engineer. So I had a very much a science kind of background or childhood. How do things work? You know, that was my dad's big thing and my brother too. And but I also really like psychology, you know, it's really interesting. Like why do people do what they do and why do they think that way? It's just amazing. He's always, you know, just fascinating. And so in college I majored in in biology and in psychology, double majored. You know, back in those days we didn't really have neuroscience as a major in in undergraduate it was, you know, you were either a scientist or you were kind of in the liberal arts where psychology was. And so,
you know, I was exposed to both, but I didn't know really how to to marry the two And then. I did a couple years of research, just kind of ******** biology research, and I in like cardiovascular work. And then I decided to go back and get my doctorate and I decided to do it in in kind of that combination. It's, you know, it's often referred to now as behavioral neuroscience because it's trying to understand that's so much behavior but like. How do we do the things we do? Not just why, which is psychology more, but how does it work? How does the brain construct memories and thoughts and you know, things like that?
And then it took me a while to kind of find my niche. I did different things, but I ended up focusing mostly on stress and memory. How does it the stress and memory? Interact, you know some people, you know, often people think stress is, is bad for memory, but that's not exactly true. I mean the reason why we have a stress response is because it's useful. It's useful to get, you know, our system activated to release hormones like cortisol into our blood so we can recover norepinephrine and epinephrine so we can. Fight or flight, you know there's lots of these systems in our body are actually quite useful. It's just that they get kind of coopted from times for to bad consequences. So anyway, I studied that for a really long time and and did some work on mechanisms of memory primarily and then about 10 years ago I I guess it's more like 15 kind of decided to go. Definitely back, but into more practical aspects of this work. So I wanted to develop this intervention. I wanted to talk more about recovery and how to help people and not even just recover, but just train their brain. You know, always be thinking about, oh, I have this beautiful brain and I need to keep it healthy, yeah. And, you know, what can we do besides, you know, common things like get sleep and drink water and, you know, things like that. I mean, what can we really do to enhance the the health of our brain and also not to wait until it's too late. You know, I think a lot of times people wait until they're really suffering or they've had some kind of disorder or disease or,
you know, traumatic life experience. And then they go, oh, I need to really get some help now. And so kind of wanted to get that message out there. Like we have to kind of keep our brain fit for life like we would our muscles or, you know, our abs or hair or whatever. Our brain is the most important organ we possess and it makes us who we are. So we should know more about it and pay more attention to how we treat, most definitely. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about the history of cptsd and how they came about.
Yeah. So cptsd is otherwise known as complex PTSD. It's kind of a newer term. I've see it more, you know, out there in the world. I hear people talking about the distinguish between complex PTSD and. Regular PTSD or sometimes referred to as simple PTSD, don't really like that term. Simple. But,
you know, the idea is that simple or or traditional kind of ideas about PTSD focus on on a big event some, you know, kind of harrowing traumatic experience that you can define like an earthquake or a rape or a violent attack or a.
Natural disaster of some sort, so you know something that you are war, you know, something you can really define. Whereas complex Pfc is more trusting. It could evolve all kinds of different events that kind of kind of meld together. Maybe like suffering with a chronic illness or taking care of someone with a chronic illness or you know, emotional traumatic abuse throughout childhood. And then followed by more trauma as an adult, Racism, discrimination, you know, things that just add up. Yes, most definitely. So those are kind of the distinctions. And you know, I use the word everyday trauma to kind of encompass really both of them, you know, everyday trauma. In the regular context of PTSD means a big event. You know, something dramatic that happens that you can define, but then it lives on every day, in your memories and your thoughts, for every day you know, practically. You think about it, or you remember it, or you have a hard time not thinking about it. And then there's these other. Everyday traumas that are more like the complex where it could happen, something. The pandemic is a good example, actually, because it went on for so long and there were so many twists and turns and we were afraid, you know, a lot of people were afraid for their lives and their loved ones and their groceries and, you know, just school. And there's just so many things that day after day and now we're kind of looking. Someone back on it, even though it's someone still in it and realizing it, it was traumatic for most
people in in the world. In the whole world,
Yeah. So that's what I use. I use that word, everyday trauma to kind of describe both of those types of trauma,
but maybe to go into the history a little bit, you know? The word PTSD, or the term post traumatic stress disorder, didn't really come about until after Vietnam and during the Vietnam War. You know, all these men came home and they were showing all these symptoms that were kind of, you know, kind of unusual to some extent. They were a lot of anxiety, a lot of panic. They were, you know, reliving these memories. There was a lot of addictions to both opiates and alcohol. And so that term kind of came into being really during the Vietnam War.
Before that it was referred to sometimes as shell shock. So like in World War Two, they called it shell shock. So they thought the shells from the from the bombs were and the guns were damaging the brain. Back in the Civil War, they called it nostalgia because they thought that the soldiers were just nostalgic for for home, which obviously they were. So it's gone through, you know, some perturbations. But I think we've all kind of landed on this word PTSD now,
and also we've kind of come to realize it's more than just the response to war. You know, yeah, it's much more than that. And. And that has taken a while. You know, when I first started working in this field, you know, some decades ago now that was, you know, most people's kind of instinct was, oh, you're talking about soldiers or the war or something like that and men primarily. And I think it's good, definitely that we've expanded the knowledge about it and some people now. I don't pretty much know you can. You can have PTSD in response to many, many experiences aside from being in combat. Oh, most, most most definitely, yeah. In fact, you know the the, the experience that it is the most likely to induce PTSD is is sexual violence. If you look at the actual numbers, the percentage, it's yeah, it's the word, yeah. No. I'd have to, you know, people can get over a lot of things, but sexual childhood, sexual abuse or even as an adult, that stuff sticks with you. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's, you know, that's been my, my focus and my research now for some years. We're doing some work now. And yeah, it's a it's important and it's but it's sadly pervasive. Okay.
What have you learned about stress and trauma in women?
Oh my gosh, that's a big question.
Back in the 90s was when I was doing kind of more preclinical studies looking at stress and trauma. You know, people didn't really look study females that much. And there are many reasons. You know, in laboratory studies like using rats and mice, they often use males or they almost exclusively use males. In clinical studies, they tended to to study males, you know, partly because they didn't want to do anything that would could damage a fetus if a woman was pregnant. And there's just lots of reasons, even what I said before about PTSD being associated with with veterans from the war. So a lot of the research was done in males and I was a little bit concerned about that because, you know, if you look at the mental illnesses that are that are related to stress and trauma, they are much more prevalent in women than in men. So if you look at PTSD, for example, it's almost three times more prevalent in women than men if you looked at depression, depression. Diagnosis are twice as prevalent in women than in men. Anxiety disorders are more common in women than men. So it seemed curious to me at the time that all the research was being done in in males. And so I did some studies and indeed found there's very different responses to stress in in females than in males. You know,
a lot of these responses are. Depend on hormones because we have such different hormones and these hormones are super powerful. They really change the structure of our brain and we even found different brain regions my lab did are found are involved in different stress responses and females than males. So
that's accepted more now you know there's a there's a mandate from the National Institute of Health that. People have to study both males and females now, so there's much more research on this topic than there was back then, which I'm thankful for.
But you know, in addition to the differences, just basic differences between males and females,
females also change a lot over their life. Yes, I think our next question was how does it change? Over their lifetime, yeah, a lot. And you know, if you think about it, that's obvious because we all go through puberty, which is a big change in the brain. And of course, males and females go through different transitions because of the hormones that are, that they are exposed to, that their brain is exposed to.
And interestingly enough, that's when these sex differences in PTSD and depression arise after puberty. So if you look at the numbers of of people diagnosed with, you know, depression or PTSD, there's similar really before puberty. But once women start their menstruate, then there's a higher incidence.
There's also changes during. Pregnancy. When there's lots of estrogen
cages in mood, for example, which then you change even more once the baby is delivered, because then we hormone levels drop off for some people who have, you know, postpartum depression, even psychosis after this experience. And then there's of course, changes that happen with menopause. A lot of women experience some depression and even some psychosis during menopause and perimenopause. So one of the things that I've learned from my own research, but also just reading the literature, is that emails are just very.
Changeable. We change a lot. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, we need to change. We need to change When we have children. We need to change as we get older. We need to learn differently and respond to different things. So it's not a bad thing. It's just, it's just, it's just different, you know? We're just different. No, I get that most definitely.
Talk a little bit more about reminiscing. You mentioned that, a lot of it, and maybe how we can maybe stop ruminating so much. Yeah, rumination. Rumination has become kind of one of the focus, really, of my research lately. I'm really interested in it. It's I ruminate a lot about it, actually. So what is irrumination? So irrumination is a thought. It's a repetitive thought, meaning it's a thought that you have over and over again. It's a type of memory because it is repetitive. So you remember the thought and then you keep going back to it. It's usually auto or it's actually by definition autobiographical, meaning it's something about you, something about your life that you know, you keep thinking about that happens. It's usually negative, you know, not necessarily, but usually when people ruminate, it's something they they wish they hadn't done
or they can't quite figure out why it happened. So they just keep going over and over it. I I like to think of them as memories laced with mood. We have this memory, but it's also got a a mood to it, right? It's got some mood to it. That's. Problem. That makes it definitely problematic.
In fact, if you look at sex differences again in rumination, women ruminate a lot more than men do, just inherently, irrespective of, you know, any kind of disorder. And but they actually ruminate less as they go over. So there is there is hope.
They're definitely tied to depression, rumination. So if you look at people who are depressed, they ruminate a lot more than than people who aren't depressed. And, you know, there's some studies suggesting that rumination may even contribute to the high incidence of of depression in women.
Okay. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense. Yeah. And how to do it last, well, that's a I can talk about that maybe later if we talk about my my brain from this program. But I I do want to say, you know that just knowing you're doing it or knowing more about it is helpful. You know, because a lot of these thoughts that we have are are so-called automatic. They just kind of happen and you kind of know a little bit more about them and how the brain generates them and how. You can become, once you're more aware of them, you can kind of say, hey, you know what, I don't need to think about that again. Like, I I heard this woman one time. She was talking about it and she was like, well, I was going to go to South Africa on a trip and I was planning what I was going to pack for this trip. And I decided what I was going to take. And then I just still kept going over it over and over and over again. Like, what am I going to take on this trip? And you know, that seems like a benign example. It's definitely not necessarily negative, but it was preventing her from being present. She's always thinking about this suitcase situation. And so she was unable to kind of like. Do what she was doing, you know, be present with what was happening now. And so I think if there's anything to kind of take away about rumination is it's not only that ruminations themselves can be problematic, you
know, it's that they're keeping you from, from being present, keeping you from focusing on, on what you're doing actually now. Oh yeah, most definitely.
I do want to say one more thing actually, about lumination. So
when you have a memory, when you, when you recreate a memory of your life, or anything really for that matter, you bring the memory up into the present moment. And what the brain does then is it makes another memory, it makes another memory that's associated with that old memory, you know, So if I. I don't know. Bring up a memory of my uncle, who I loved a lot in this moment. And I'm talking to you. I've made another memory of my uncle in this moment. Doesn't mean that the old memory is gone or different, but I have yet another memory. And so one of the problems with rumination is that you're just making more and more of these memories in your brain. And those memories are. Real. You know, I'm not real in the sense that the memory is, you know, that it exists anymore, but it's a structure or a biochemical change in your brain every time you make a new memory. And, you know, some of these memories, we don't necessarily want more traces of them in our brain. Yeah. Yeah. Tell us a little bit about your memory research.
Yeah. So like I said, I've been interested in memory for for several decades now. I did a lot of studies on the
memory, the mechanisms of memory. It's, to me at least, it's a really fascinating topic because like, how does that even work? Just think about it. You went and did something this morning. Maybe you had coffee. At your local, I don't know, coffee shop and you saw a friend and you can remember that now or something that happened in your childhood, whatever. And it's not it doesn't exist anymore. It's just because something in your brain kind of recorded that experience and is able not only to record it, but to kind of replay it. Almost like a a video. So you know it's. It's interesting to think like, how does the brain do that? You know, I wish we knew. I can tell you we actually don't know. You know, we have certain ideas and and and a lot of evidence and we know certain brain regions, for example, are involved, like the hippocampus. You know, the hippocampus is a part of our brain that we use to learn to make new memories.
And that's the main structure of the brain that I've been studying. It's really plastic, meaning it changes a lot all the time, no matter what you're doing. If I were to put an electrode down in your hippocampus right now, it would be firing up a storm because it's taking in all the information that's happening right now, What you're seeing, what you're hearing, what you're thinking. And it's kind of. Processing that so you can have a, you know, kind of a feeling or a experience of what's happening.
So I think of it like as a real time learning machine. It's very dynamic. It doesn't really store memories. So you already encoded a memory, It's not stored in the hippocampus, but you need the hippocampus to kind of get that memory rolling again. And associate it with what's happening now.
So anyway, it's a really it's, you know, it's it's a very popular structure in neuroscience. A lot of people are fascinated by it. It's it's got special cells. It's got cells that for example encode where you are in space and time. And you know, those kind of memories are really important when you ask someone like even for a traumatic experience or anything. I usually remember I can see myself, I can see myself in the room when it happened, or I can see the street where it happened. So the location is kind of in space and time. The hippocampus is really good at encoding that or making an imprint of what happened, Yes, and even if the brain doesn't remember, the body remembers.
Yeah, well, the well, the brain is, is connected to the body through the nervous system, right. So the memory is in the brain, but the response is often in the body, the rest of the body. I mean, the brain is part of our body, but the body is encoding the is connected with the feelings. You know, I like to think of it as this is how I usually break it down. You have these thoughts. The thoughts are generated in our brain and those thoughts are connected to memories. And again the memories are in our brain somewhere and then those memories are connected to us feelings and then the feelings are in our body. And so the thought kind of instigates the memory oftentimes. And then the memory is tied to these feelings that we need. So maybe our heart rate increases or we start to sweat or we become afraid. You know, those are mediated through the, what we call the autonomic nervous system in our body. Okay.
Yeah. Tell us a little bit about neurogenesis.
Yeah, Neurogenesis. So neurogenesis means? New neurons and neurons of course, are the the cells in our brain that are kind of unique, you know, to the to the nervous system anyway, throughout the nervous system, both the body and the brain. But neurons
are kind of unusual if you if you compare them to other cells in our body, most of the cells in our body regenerate in our skin cells. Hair cells, liver cells, etcetera. Blood cells, you know, they, they're always turning over, but most of the neurons in our brain do not. So we're, you know, we're born with some of them or we're born with a lot of them actually. And we have them for most of our lives
and for many years, even when I was first in in Graduate School or up to Graduate School and beyond. We learned that the brain, that these neurons would never regenerate. So if you lost them because of, you know, some kind of head trauma or disease,
stroke, et cetera, you couldn't get them back. And you know that's still generally true. Most neurons, the vast majority of neurons in our brain do not regenerate. But it turns out that there is a population of cells that regenerates, and these cells happen to be in the hippocampus. There are a few other places too, but they're definitely on the hippocampus, the part of the brain we use for learning. So when they were first discovered or kind of rediscovered in the 90s, I was involved in in those the first studies really to associate these cells. With memory. And so we did some studies showing that if you get rid of these neurons in the hippocampus, learning is impaired, suggesting they're somehow involved in learning. We also did some studies suggesting that or showing that they often die. Many of these neurons die, but if you learn something new, they can survive. So it's kind of A use it or lose it phenomena, which I think is, you know, kind of cool. Like you have all these cells in the hippocampus, they're being produced, you know, day after day, maybe 10. We don't know for sure how many, maybe 1020 thousand a day, but a lot of them die over weeks unless you're learning something new and something kind of effortful. So I think that's the important thing is we have to. One way to keep our brain healthy is to keep learning and and to keep learning things that are engaging. You know, not necessarily crossword puzzles or things that are so you kind of already know how to do and they're just kind of more distracting, but rather something that really challenges your brain. But that seems to be really good for these these types of processes, including neurogenesis. Most definitely, yeah.
Thanks for listening, Rachel. And recovery. We'll be back next week at 10:00 AM Follow us on your favorite social media platform and on your favorite podcast platform. If you have any questions, reach out to Rachel and recovery. Thanks for listening. And TuneIn next Thursday at 10:00 AM. Thanks.
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