Trauma in Milwaukee, elsewhere intensified by unconscious bias
Brains operate faster than conscious control
It’s a fact of life for neuroscientists but often forgotten when nonscientists talk about a person’s inability to cope in school, the workplace or society in general:
The human brain has 86 billion nerve cells or neurons, and each is connected to some 10,000 synapses, which comes to a mind-boggling 1 billion synapses in each cubic centimeter of brain.
That means the mind continuously processes ideas and impulses far too rapidly for the conscious mind to follow, often categorizing people by race and gender within milliseconds. It’s known as implicit bias and is present among the calmest of people in the best of times.
But a high-trauma environment, such as the urban center of Milwaukee, can scramble the brain’s fast-moving neurobiological triggers, intensifying the impact of implicit bias, multiplying the instances of unconscious racial profiling and compounding the psychological suffering for those with traumatized minds, according to researchers speaking Thursday at a major trauma conference in Milwaukee.
“Implicit biases are always there, but being in a chaotic high-trauma environment can trigger and intensify biases,” said L. Song Richardson, the dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law.
Richardson, who’s half black and half Korean, said she might seem like one of the last people to harbor an implicit bias of any kind. She calls herself an “egalitarian” and worked for years as a civil rights lawyer and public defender. But she began to research the mental workings behind automatic bias after she realized how often she made unconscious stereotypes.
“Our brains unconsciously associate black people with negative things and white people with positive things,” Richardson told the 1,325 attendees crowded into the Wisconsin Center downtown.
The slings and arrows of unconscious stereotypes add to the daily stress of those on the receiving end of the subtle but unrelenting profiling. “Your brains are constantly operating in the background,” she said. Citing numerous studies, she said the mind “does these things without realizing it.”
The unfathomable complexities of the mind add to the suffering of those who live with neurological trauma. Milwaukee this week is hosting an unprecedented three-day conference meant to dissect trauma and its toxic social aftereffects because a raft of studies show how deeply neurological trauma has embedded itself into the fabric of society.
The U.S. National Institutes of Health estimates that 14.4 million Americans will be diagnosed in their lifetimes with post-traumatic stress disorders and the vast preponderance of those people never saw military combat — only violence, assault, gunfire and abuse in their own homes and neighborhoods.
“A Time to Heal,” a Journal Sentinel series published last year, documented an epidemic of civilian trauma in Milwaukee’s urban center, exploring entire neighborhoods where exposure to traumatic experiences is an everyday fact of urban life.
Richardson said the mind becomes like typing a Google search that offers prompts even when only a few syllables of the search is typed, such as how “permit terrorism” comes up automatically when “does Islam” is typed, she said. Video-game-like computer simulations show that police are more likely to shoot an unarmed black man and slower to shoot an armed white man, Richardson said.
Those with traumatized minds and hyper-vigilant stress response systems, which chronically are overwhelmed, have even less control of the deluge of unconscious impulses and associations, Bruce Perry, an internationally recognized psychiatrist and neuroscience researcher, told the conference Thursday.
Those with unresolved trauma also have less control over their repeat loops of traumatic memory triggers, Perry said. “There is a neurobiology that underlies implicit bias,” Perry said.
The tragedy, Perry said, is the unfulfilled lives of those who live with untapped potential and an uncontrolled blur of mental trauma. “Think of the potential of the untapped dysregulated cortexes out there,” Perry said.