THE BOUNCEBACK BRAIN
A year of trauma has changed how our brains work. Understanding that change is key to rewiring it back to a smarter place
What happens to our brains when we go through trauma? After a year that’s transformed us all, ELLE explores if it’s even possible for us to go back to how we were before
HE WORKS SIX TO SEVEN DAYS A WEEK, but when he goes home for dinner with his family, Dr Thomas Yadegar takes a few minutes to gather himself before going inside. Sometimes he breaks down. The 20 doctors he leads at the hospital where he works confide in him that they too ‘stop on their drive home and just cry’, he says. They all have nightmares. ‘I don’t see how any human who has gone through and witnessed what we have could not be changed dramatically and to the core,’ he says. Dr Yadegar hasn’t had a second to think about how 14 months of watching Covid-19 patients die will affect him going forward.
Many of us are experiencing our own traumas, wondering when we can return to our former selves – psychologically, emotionally and socially – or if our brains even can. That organ between our ears is constantly changing; a quality called neuroplasticity, in which the 200 trillion connections between the 86 billion neurons in our brain morph to accommodate new situations and environments. ‘Brain circuitry comes to reflect what you can do. What you spend your time on changes your brain,’ says Stanford University neuroscientist Dr David Eagleman, author of Livewired. ‘You’re more than what you eat; you become the information you digest.’
The pandemic, the politics and the Zooms are all part of who we are now. ‘We can never go back to being the person we were before,’ Eagleman says, because we can never un-experience what we’ve been through.