#psychmatic

So apparently there's this massive study of over 17,000 people that found if you had 4 or more traumatic experiences as a kid, you're 12 times more likely to attempt suicide, develop depression, or struggle with substance abuse as an adult. and it can knock up to 20 years off your life expectancy.

but here's the part that actually got me. childhood trauma doesn't just leave emotional scars, it literally, physically rewires your brain's architecture. your amygdala, the part that detects threats, gets stuck on high alert and starts treating a weird tone of voice or a loud noise like a life-threatening emergency. meanwhile your prefrontal cortex, the part that's supposed to pump the brakes on all that panic, never fully develops because your brain was too busy building survival circuits instead.

and your hippocampus, the thing that's supposed to file memories away neatly with timestamps? trauma shrinks it. so traumatic memories don't get stored as "something bad that happened in the past," they stay fragmented and timeless, which is why a random smell can make your body react like it's happening right now.

the wildly hopeful part though is that the same neuroplasticity that let trauma reshape your brain means it can be reshaped again. your brain is literally ready whenever you are.

your brain is literally producing light right now and i need everyone to stop scrolling and absorb that for a second

a 2025 study put 20 people in a completely dark room with devices sensitive enough to detect a single photon, aimed them at their skulls, and confirmed that the human brain emits real measurable light that passes right through bone. they're calling the technique photoencephalography which is basically an EEG but for light instead of electricity, and honestly the name alone sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi novel.

but here's where it gets actually wild. the light patterns changed depending on what the person was thinking about. eyes open produced a different glow than eyes closed, listening to sounds lit up the temporal lobe differently than silence did, and the relationship between electrical brain activity and the light wasn't even a simple one-to-one thing. your brain apparently has this whole secondary communication layer happening in photons that we've just been completely blind to until now.

the light comes from your mitochondria, those little cellular power plants that use 20% of your entire body's energy just to keep your brain running. the chemical reactions that produce all that energy throw off tiny bursts of light as a byproduct, and some researchers think it might not even be waste, it might actually be how neurons talk to each other through something like biological fiber optics.

Scientists scanned 850,000 DNA sites in refugee families and found that trauma rewrites your genetic code. and then your kids inherit it. and then their kids inherit it. three generations deep.

a 2025 Yale study found 21 specific DNA sites altered by war trauma that showed up in children and grandchildren who never experienced the original events. a separate study found the same pattern in Holocaust survivor families, changes in the brain's trust and bonding circuits, still there in the third generation.

but it gets worse. a Nature study mapped over 2 million brain cells from 111 people and found that PTSD physically rewrites the genes in your inhibitory neurons, the cells that are literally supposed to keep you calm. your brain's braking system gets its instruction manual rewritten.

and you don't even have to experience it directly. 10% of PTSD cases come from just witnessing violence. women are twice as likely to develop PTSD from watching it happen to someone else.

the one piece of good news: the first new PTSD drug in over 20 years just got FDA breakthrough designation. science is finally catching up.

Your DNA remembers things you've never experienced, that's not a metaphor.