Isn't it well-established that learning of any sort produces physical change in the brain?
Why would experienced trauma be any different from any other extremely powerful (and repeated) (yet traumatic) learning experience, thus causing permanent change in the brain to "capture" and "remember" the incident like any other powerful learning experience?
Learning a fact physically "records" the fact in the brain, but is it well-established that powerful learning experiences can cause changes to the overall functioning of the brain?
I mean, not the physical changes that amount to "now your motor neurons have changed so that they swing a golf club more accurately" but physical changes that are like "now your motor system or learning system or the regulation of something seemingly unrelated is structurally different because you've been seeing/hearing/thinking these things" ?
I'm not talking about a memory "subsystem" being changed so that it now contains and remembers the incident; that's the usual function of it; I'm talking about the memory (or other) subsystem being changed so that it is now somehow fundamentally altered, processes things differently from its normal function, or fails to process something that it could before.
Why would experienced trauma be any different from any other extremely powerful (and repeated) (yet traumatic) learning experience, thus causing permanent change in the brain to "capture" and "remember" the incident like any other powerful learning experience?