Clinical Manifestations of Body Memories: The Impact of Past Bodily Experiences on Mental Health

Summary & key facts

The authors review research and suggest that negative "body memories" — past bodily experiences of touch, pain, movement, or inner signals that are stored in memory — may help explain why some mental health problems have strong physical or bodily symptoms. They bring together findings from neuroscience, clinical cases, and psychotherapy, point to brain areas like the insula and hippocampus, and give clinical examples. The paper treats this as a hypothesis and says the detailed brain and memory mechanisms are still largely unknown and need more study.

Key facts:

• Body memory is defined in the paper as the sum of past bodily experiences stored in memory that influence behavior; it includes tactile, motor, proprioceptive, painful and interoceptive experiences and their accompanying emotions.
• The authors propose that negative body memories could contribute to somatic symptoms, traumatic re-experiences, and dissociative symptoms, but they present this as a hypothesis rather than a proven cause.
• In one cited study, all patients with asymbolia for pain showed lesions to the insular cortex after stroke or closed head injury; one patient developed asymbolia after damage to the posterior insula and adjacent parietal operculum.
• Studies cited report that people with hippocampal damage showed no cortisol increase during a standardized public-speaking stress test that normally raises cortisol, and they spent less time in 'safe places' and behaved less cautiously in a
• The article notes that the insular cortex is viewed as a hub connecting sensory body signals to memory regions in the medial temporal lobe (including the hippocampus) and to emotion regions such as the amygdala.
• The authors emphasize a knowledge gap: the detailed cognitive and neuronal mechanisms by which past bodily experiences are stored and later influence mental health are largely unknown, and they call for new ways to measure and test these bo

Abstract

Bodily experiences such as the feeling of touch, pain or inner signals of the body are deeply emotional and activate brain networks that mediate their perception and higher-order processing. While the ad hoc perception of bodily signals and their influence on behavior is empirically well studied, there is a knowledge gap on how we store and retrieve bodily experiences that we perceived in the past, and how this influences our everyday life. Here, we explore the hypothesis that negative body memories, that is, negative bodily experiences of the past that are stored in memory and influence behavior, contribute to the development of somatic manifestations of mental health problems including somatic symptoms, traumatic re-experiences or dissociative symptoms. By combining knowledge from the areas of cognitive neuroscience and clinical neuroscience with insights from psychotherapy, we identify Clinical Body Memory (CBM) mechanisms that specify how mental health problems could be driven by corporeal experiences stored in memory. The major argument is that the investigation of the neuronal mechanisms that underlie the storage and retrieval of body memories provides us with empirical access to reduce the negative impact of body memories on mental health.

Topics

Action Observation and Synchronization Anxiety, Depression, Psychometrics, Treatment, Cognitive Processes Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments

Categories

Health Sciences Medicine Psychiatry and Mental health

Tags

Argument (complex analysis) Cognition Cognitive psychology Feeling Internal medicine Medicine Mental health Neuroscience Perception Psychology Psychotherapist Social psychology