Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) poses an ongoing challenge to society, to health systems, and to the trauma victims themselves. Today PTSD is often considered an incurable chronic problem that lacks effective treatment. While PTSD is closely related to memory, it also affects many physiological systems. PTSD is usually treated with medications and psychotherapy with moderate success, leaving a substantial proportion of patients with enduring distress and disability. Therefore, a search for better treatment options is vital. In this paper, we propose a model in which a conversation-based technique is integrated with bodily manipulation through acupuncture. This approach first emerged in clinical experience showing intriguing results from treating PTSD patients using acupuncture as a main strategy. Its theoretical foundations derive from the clinic and rely on contemporary neuroscience’s understanding of memory consolidation and reconsolidation processes. Research shows that acupuncture can have potentially positive effects at three levels: (a) achieving a balance between sympathetic and parasympathetic neural activity; (b) reducing activation in the limbic system, hence inducing a calming effect; (c) reshaping the functional connectivity map within important and relevant cortical regions that encompass the default-mode network. We suggest that coupling traumatic memory retrieval leading to reconsolidation, combined with acupuncture, offers considerable potential for positive clinical improvement in patients with PTSD. This may explain the positive results of the described case studies and can pave the path for future advances in research and treatment in this field.

Forming narratives are of key importance to human experience, as it allows one to render large portions of information into relatively compacted stories for future retrieval, and give meaning to otherwise fragmented occurrences. The neural mechanisms that underlie coherent narrative construction of causally-connected information over prolonged temporal periods are yet unclear. Participants in this fMRI study observed consecutive scenes from a full-length movie either in their original order, enabling causal inferences over time, or in reversed order, impeding the formation of coherent narratives. In between scenes, we presented short periods of blank screens for analysis of post-encoding processing. Using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) and inter-subject correlations, we aimed at exploring functional connections among brain networks that take part in enabling coherent narrative construction. We detected two separate networks that discerned between coherent and incoherent narrative conditions: a network associated with information processing, consisting of primary and high-order association cortices that showed increased functional connectivity among themselves, as well as a distributed fronto-parietal network. In addition, hippocampal activation was found to correlate with portions of the visual processing hierarchy in a time dependent manner, parallel to the unfolding of the narrative. We suggest that with the unfolding over time of causal relationships among presented scenes, top-down modulation of posterior association cortices and frontoparietal networks enables the integration and binding of incoming and previously acquired information to form coherent and concise narratives.

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Forming narratives is of key importance to human experience, enabling one to render large amounts of information into relatively compacted stories for future retrieval, giving meaning to otherwise fragmented occurrences. The neural mechanisms that underlie coherent narrative construction of causally connected information over prolonged temporal periods are yet unclear. Participants in this fMRI study observed consecutive scenes from a full-length movie either in their original order, enabling causal inferences over time, or in reverse order, impeding a key component of coherent narratives-causal inference. In between scenes, we presented short periods of blank screens for examining post-encoding processing effects. Using multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA) followed by seed-base correlation analysis, we hypothesized that networks involved in online monitoring of incoming information on the one hand, and offline processing of previous occurrences on the other would differ between the groups. We found that despite the exposure to the same scenes, the chronological-order condition exhibited enhanced functional connectivity in frontoparietal regions associated with information integration and working memory. The reverse-order condition yielded offline, post-scene coactivation of neural networks involved in social cognition and particularly theory of mind and action comprehension. These findings shed light on offline processes of narrative construction efforts, highlighting the role of social cognition networks in seeking for narrative coherence.