Page 470 - Total War on PTSD

around us but not necessarily focused on them. We may be reading highway signs or quickly checking the computer screen or the speedometer on our dashboard. In those moments, we are receiving signals from many directions, both subconsciously and consciously. Our brains are making sense of all of this information. The testing of visual fields during a typical eye examination seems to assess peripheral eyesight. However, that test is performed mainly at a conscious level. Someone asks if we “see” a flash in the periphery or not. To do the peripheral testing during the 20th century eye examination, conscious attention is shifted to the periphery. In life, most peripheral awareness occurs at a subconscious level while attention is on something else. Testing needs to be modified!
Prolonged stress, shock, injury, or disease can affect spatial awareness, thereby impacting a person’s behavior, perceptions, and responses to environmental changes. For people suffering from PTSD, this shift in spatial awareness can be dramatic and oftentimes leads to abnormal brain and nerve activity. A common, compensatory mechanism to sensory overload is simply to ignore external environmental stimuli. The mind usually can tune out unwanted peripheral or background auditory and visual signals in a process called latent inhibition. This process disengages eye-aiming at targets in the surrounding environment, but this filtering capability is hindered when body systems are constantly in survival mode due to extreme stress, injury, or a neurological disorder. For a patient suffering from PTSD, sensory overload sets in far more quickly than it does for most, and its effects on the patient’s basic agency are wide-reaching. Certain patients actually deteriorate so far as to experience panic attacks or seizures, and sensory overload can actually lead to flashbacks.
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