What Does Childhood Trauma Tell Us

Brodmann Areas - What the Brain Tells Us About How We Think, Act, and Feel

Childhood trauma results in developmental trauma, impacting the brain's development.

More than a century after Korbinian Brodmann’s death, his work continues influencing client results in neurofeedback. A German scientist studying the brain, Brodmann’s publications on the brain’s cytoarchitecture founded the field of anatomical brain mapping. His research began to identify what is now identified as 48 sections with various functions based on their cytoarchitecture or cellular makeup of tissue and structure. This article will address the Brodmann areas impacted by developmental trauma, their function, and associated symptoms.

Anterior Cingulate

The anterior cingulate cortex regulates emotions, including unpleasant emotions associated with pain and helps prevent automatic threat responses. It helps make decisions in uncertain situations and involves acquiring and expressing contextual fear. The anterior cingulate manages social cognition, helps estimate other people's motivation, and updates that information based on new evidence (awareness of or experiences with the other person), a crucial function in choosing appropriate boundaries, seeing red flags, and creating distance with toxic people. When this area is damaged, it results in emotional dysregulation, cognitive impairments, attention issues, motor control problems, difficulties understanding social cues, and interacting appropriately with others.

Cingulate Gyrus

The cingulate gyrus, as a whole, is a brain structure that plays a role in processing emotions, memory and attention, and reward-based decision-making. When this brain area is damaged, the individual will experience abnormal behavioral changes, impaired memory, lack of motivation, loss of cognitive flexibility (becoming rigid), decreased attention, and difficulty navigating conflict.

Inferior Frontal Gyrus

The inferior frontal gyrus is a large part of the frontal lobe’s lower surface that fully develops between the early to mid-twenties. This brain region plays a role in higher-order cognitive tasks, including producing fluent language and inhibiting responses. Damage to this area is most commonly associated with difficulty in speech and can result in a condition known as Broca’s aphasia and impairments in decision-making and responses.

Insula

The insula is in the central interior of the brain. It is involved in pain perception, body awareness, emotions, addictive behaviors, having a sense of self, reading others’ emotions, and motor control, as well as food interests (overeating or restricting food), sex drive, initiative, and motivation. Damage to this area results in difficulty with touch, taste, sound, and smell, inability to feel pain or feeling pain when the source of pain is no longer there, emotional dysregulation (anger and disgust), difficulty with social relationships, abnormal interpersonal trust (trusting too much), inability to empathize, impaired decision-making, especially concerning risk or uncertainty, addiction, difficulty speaking, impaired awareness, disturbance in the sense of self, and developmental delays in children.

Medial Frontal Gyrus

The medial frontal gyrus is involved in social cognition and performance monitoring from the top of the forehead to the brain's midline. Damage to this area results in emotional dysregulation, flattened affect (no emotion), difficulty with decision-making, apathy, a reduced ability to monitor one’s behavior and understand their impact on others, and inappropriate emotional responses in social situations due to impaired inhibitory control. In other words, a disruption in the individual’s ability to appropriately manage emotions, understand social cues and behave appropriately for the given setting.

Middle Frontal Gyrus

A neighbor to the medial frontal gyrus, this brain region is involved in attention, working memory, and language processing. Damage to this brain region results in impairments to executive functions like attention, working memory, decision-making, planning, and behavioral inhibition. Individuals may experience difficulty with complex tasks, have poor problem-solving skills, and have poor social interactions. These behaviors can be associated with conditions like ADHD and some personality disorders, depending on the severity of the damage.

Middle Temporal Gyrus

The middle temporal gyrus is a brain region located in the lateral surface of the temporal lobe (area above the ears). It is responsible for language processing, observation of motion, and deductive reasoning. Damage to the middle temporal gyrus results in difficulty understanding spoken words or sentences, learning and retaining new information, memory and attention problems, and difficulty identifying and categorizing objects, making the individual feel disorganized.

Parahippocampal Gyrus

Located in the temporal lobe, this brain region is responsible for cognitive functions including memory navigation of surroundings, emotional processing, and working memory. Damage to the parahippocampal makes it difficult for the individual to learn new environments, unable to recognize objects in a scene but not the scene as a whole, memory problems, emotional and cognitive dysfunction, intrusive thoughts, negative rumination, and memory issues.

Poscentral Cingulate Gyrus

The posterior cingulate gyrus involves memory, decision-making, and cognitive functions. It plays a vital role in both the limbic system and the default mode network, which will be discussed below. Damage to the posterior cingulate cortex leads to a range of cognitive impairments, such as attention, memory, self-awareness, and the ability to switch between tasks, making daily activities challenging and exhausting.

Precentral Gyrus

The precentral gyrus, the primary motor cortex, initiates and controls voluntary movements. Damage to this area leads to paralysis or weakness on the opposite side of the body from where the damage was and can affect fine motor skills like dexterity in the hands and fingers, and one’s ability to articulate words. Strokes often impact this area.

Superior Temporal Gyrus

The superior temporal gyrus processes sound and involves language comprehension and social cognition. It is also responsible for short-term auditory memory, auditory memory in people with PTSD, and perception of social cues and affects social interactions and communication.

Conclusion

When these areas of the brain are impacted by chronic stress, toxins in chemically based products, abuse, neglect, bullying, alcohol, drugs, or anything trauma-related, the individual’s emotional regulation, behavior, and cognitive processes are disrupted. This can result in social isolation, difficulty with interpersonal relationships and communication, steady employment, and daily functioning. Talk therapy, though helpful in many cases, can cause these areas of the brain to be triggered, sometimes making the individual feel worse before they feel better. Neurofeedback, a non-invasive approach to soothing these areas of the brain, can have a significant impact in as little as 7-10 sessions. Rather than talking about life’s difficulties or challenges, neurofeedback retrains the brain, giving it the resources to collect and integrate information from the environment and the ability to engage in emotional processing at an unconscious level. Individuals experience a greater sense of calm and intuitive understanding. They can more fully engage in therapeutic processes like cognitive behavioral therapy, dialectic behavioral therapy, or psychotherapy, to name a few. Additionally, social interactions, relationships, and work environments improve.

While this is a short list of implications, the important thing to remember is that changing your brain creates an automatic environmental shift, setting you up for success in goal setting, goal planning, better decision-making, and moving forward in your life.