Flashback is unwittingly reliving a past personal experience. It is usually linked to a traumatic experience.

Also called “involuntary recurring memory”, a flashback is a reliving of a past experience. It is part of the disorders of emotional implicit memory.

Involuntary, these mental images arise suddenly and completely invade consciousness, without necessarily having a relationship with the present situation. They can be triggered by an external stimulus such as a smell, the sight of an object or even a sound.

Flashback is most often associated with a traumatic past experience and is one of the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

A memory, even if it can be intrusive on a daily basis, does not have the same characteristics as a flashback. Indeed, as part of this sudden backtracking, the person will have the sensation of reliving in a very clear way the event previously experienced.

The notion of temporality is lost and the individual is plunged into a daze. He will have the feeling that the past is unfolding again, which often generates a strong emotional reaction.

The first theories on how memory works date back to the XNUMXth century with Herman Ebbinghaus, a German psychologist. His research enabled him to distinguish three types of memories:

• Sensory memory which is linked to the five senses;
• Short-term memory, which allows a limited amount of information to be retained for a relatively short time;
• Long-term memory which allows information to be retained over an unlimited period of time.

Traumatic memory and involuntary recurrent memory

According to a study conducted by Dr. James Bisby – a member of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience – and published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, flashback would have a link with long-term memory and would be associated with the way in which is integrated a traumatic event by two specific parts of the brain:

• The amygdala, which acts on our ability to feel emotions;
• The hippocampus, which acts on our ability to memorize past facts and events in long-term memory.

“We thought, that while the activity in the amygdala might be increased during a negative experience, that in the hippocampus might be decreased, disrupting the way in which different aspects of the body are related. experience in one memory”, Explains Dr James Bisby.

Tonsils and hippocampus are disconnected, preventing emotional memory from being processed. “The tonsils are also disconnected from the cortex which no longer receives emotional information the traumatic stimuli will continue to reach the sensory cortex but they will be treated without emotional connotation and without physical suffering which will give an impression of strangeness, d ‘unreality, of depersonalization’, explains French psychiatrist Muriel Salmona on the website of her association Mémoire traumatique et victimologie. This is called peri-traumatic dissociation.

In other words, it is an emotional response from the brain. The process of integrating long-term memory is disrupted in the event of traumatic events. A specific memory mechanism is put in place to protect the person, which can lead to episodes of involuntary recurrent memory later.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a disorder that occurs after a traumatic event. To protect yourself from this situation, you can observe a kind of psychic break-in. The memory of the trauma is fragmented, almost detached from the person and the situation. Uncontrollable, it becomes intrusive.

Psychological support will be strongly recommended. It will help victims of flashback episodes to understand the origin of this post-traumatic stress disorder. “The “demined”, “defused” traumatic memory will be able to be reintegrated into an explicit narrative and autobiographical memory freeing up psychic space. Stopping dissociating behaviors will allow neurological recovery (neurogenesis) and the recovery of a feeling of coherence and unity, of “reuniting with oneself”, details Muriel Salmona