Broca’s area is associated with language production and lesions in Broca’s area can result in an aphasia “characterized by an expressive-language deficit” in which the language produced lacks syntactical integrity and sounds “hesitant and effortful” (Matlin, 2002, p. 296).

Also of interest to this discussion, deactivations in the left frontal cortex can result also in deactivation of the left frontal pole which is associated with euphoria, and a corresponding activation of the right brain, where emotional tone of a message or situation is interpreted, and the right frontal pole, which is associated with dysphoria, suggesting that people with PTSD can create memories for the event with few words but strong negative emotions. Thus not surprising is the Gerhards et al. argument that “in PTSD subjects the degree of abnormal functional asymmetry was particularly strongly associated with alexithymia” (p. 484)—the pathological inability to put feelings into words. Moreover, Rauch & Shin report on several studies demonstrating increased rCBF associated with feeling sadness and fear but not with feeling happiness or neutral emotions, and they suggest that memories associated with (negative) high emotional arousal tend to be better remembered. Correspondingly, other studies (Foa, Molnar, & Cashman, 1995) have shown consistently that early in psychotherapy, oral and written narrations created by patients with PTSD contained notably more filler words (oral), were more disorganized and fragmented, and had much lower emotional content. These findings suggest that traumatic exposure leads to memories— formed with sparse or fragmented verbal content and strongly fear-evoking sensory content—that are strongly resistant to verbal expression.