Neuroscience of Sexual Assault, Trauma, Hate Speech, Lies, Envy, Perpetrators and its impacts.

Sushma Akoju, Oct 4, 2026 (Fully Human-generated content)

The role of hippocampus for a victim:

The role of hippocampus is that it actively tags and organizes external sensory cues such as sounds and images - which is encoding. Once sensory cues are encoded, hippocampus then groups similar cues together and stores them which are stored as memories - also known as consolidation.

The role of amygdala, cateholamines and corticosteriods

Its the amygdala which acts like a filter, captures and stores emotionally charged or fearful information as memories. High levels of cateholamines impair mechanisms that control rational thought while increased output of endogenous opiods and oxytocin can compromise one's ability to effectively express emotion. High concentrations of corticosteroids can zap the body of its energy causing body to shut down or freeze. Under no intoxication, victims experience tonic immobility or dissociation rather than fighting back.

How does neuroscience of SA vary under intoxication?

If a Sexual assault can by itself impair basic functions of brain and restrict one's ability to express emotion or fight back, then it makes it that much more challenging to even follow similar experiences even under voluntary intoxication. Also endogenous opoids might not be released naturally due to intoxication. I assume deprivation and recollection of incidents would be that much more challenging under voluntary intoxication as in the case of recent Jane Doe. Therefore I would not blame her or accuse her accounts as inconsistent as the memories, fight/freeze responses are significantly different for two different types of SAs described above.

Provocation is a means for assertion!

There are folks repeatedly intentionally calling SV/SA as lie to show victims are provoked. I would say by all means its completely valid for anyone to feel provoked when targeted with false claims. I argue victims should stay provoked to stand their ground. No one gets to tell anyone how one should feel. Trauma-awareness is poor. I remember requesting trauma-awareness training, but certain students between ages 18-22 ensured it was cancelled while they went and misreported my SV to Dean of Students as if I was lying. Due to such lack of awareness, most folks misinterpret and misjudge trauma-induced behaviors such as flat affect, delayed reporting or inconsistent statements as signs of lying. This shows surface level reasoning does no one any good. Maybe social media is all about surface level reasoning incapable of understanding the pain of others - whether hate speech, verbal attacks/insults against AI researchers or even the targeted and targeting groups of whichever hate-based discourse that takes place.

Since by neuroscience, there is strong evidence that trauma leaves a lasting imprint in the brain so every time someone falsely or jokingly calls it a lie, would give out nothing but provoked response.

Adding the fuel to existing fire, hate speech by itself deteriorates neurocognitive mechanisms of the ability to understand others' pain.

Broader question is whether people choose to engage in hate speech to completely abandon caring for one group or not - is question worth pursuing.

Neverthless, expressing hate is discarding the responsibility to respect or have empathy against a person. Whether some folks are paid to do that or not is unclear.

Research studies argue that "reduced empathy" may be caused by dehumanization not the other way round.

One hypothetical question, I would like to ask: whether people use dehumanization/verbal violence to reduce the empathy they feel due to lack of coping mechanisms to handle one's own empathy towards people/groups.

Its unfortunate to see such cognitive numbness from various human beings targeting other human beings. Whether targeted attack is against victims, members belonging to a group based on color/nationality or whether researchers working on AI. We have fundamentally forgotten we are human and we have something we can do better than this. It gives me great pain to see how various members are attacked in the name of competition.

Perpetrator's perspectives:

Perpetrators know what they have done. Their threats, SV, misleading groups and law enforcement, schools and anyone investigating, are well known to them.

Neuroscience of lies

Neuroscience of lying reveals that lying is cognitively demanding process requiring significantly more mental energy than truth-telling, characertized by increased activity in the prefrontal cortex, which suppresses truth and constructs a false narratives. The effort is often measured in increased reaction time and metabolic demand as the brain simultaneously inhibit the factual response, monitor lie for consistency, and predict listeners' reaction.

Key brain regions anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) which detects conflict between intended lie and the actual truth and amygdala generates emotional responses such as fear, anxiety or guilt. However these regions only activate during initial dishonesty, but eventually once liar enters "Deception", they enter into emotional adaptation and such detection become normalized formalizing deception. Pathological liars show reduced activations often in these regions. But conversely, being lied to activates anterior insula, which processes social pain of betrayal in neural regions associated with physical pain, which can lead to hypervigilence ad difficulty trusting others. This is often the case most future liars are also created after being lied to.

Neuroscience of Envy

Envy is associated with stronger activation in anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Envy as a social pain - activation of dACC in reponse to stronger envy stimuli may reflect the painful feature of this emotion, - suggesting envy acts as a pain in the self, potentially stemming from feeling excluded from a concern or from conflcit between positive self concept and external information. Stronger dACC activation associated with envy predicted stronger ventral striatam activation associated with schadenfreude demonstrating positive correlation between neural correlates of pain (from envy) and reward (from schadenfreude).

Neural Correlates of envy - experience of envy provoked by "upward social comparison" or "self < others", where upward social comparison is highly associated with monetary gains. For example, if some folks who don't necessarily work for profit, by ensuring to align with values, like me, receive same envy as person/groups inherently experiencing envy feel they are less than others and are rewarded monetarily less than others, which is false in my case. But it was such an envy and false assertions and strong comparisons based on stereotypes, people have ensured I would not receive any monetary benefit or resources.

Conclusions

These research studies and discussions, though written precisely as a direct record rather than adding anything new, show one thing:

There are various people in various prominent socially, societally significant roles holding responsibility, everything they do, does indeed impact several humans neuroscientifically and significantly impacting their responses and behaviors and trauma responses, not just for SV/SA victims, victims of hate speech, victims of various types of targeted hate. This makes us a society of victims, liars, deceivers and perpetrators - not just impacting text, AI and society but also at the most granular level of encoding the experiences/impacts into the brain regions of many on this planet Earth.

My question for a talk at UNH organized by prominent members at UNH, invited MIT researcher working on cellular biology for how racism is impacted based on statistics. The question, appears to remain unanswered: whether there is evidence that hate/racism/superior/inferior race/prejudices/biases are written at the cellular level with chemical interactions, supported by biological research from mechanistic neuroscience? Unfortunately.

Reasons we need draws/ties and requiring community-based social media games

The need to introduce draws/ties in social media interactions as a community games, to reduce the influence of one person's/sub-group's hate speech:

This is the reason we need to reward the draws in chess, as an example to encourage a different type of competition. Draw is not a loss. The adrenaline rush is dependent on the reward. So if we redirect or retrain draw to be rewarded highly, we might be able to encounter some of this surface level first easily available lazy generalizations or cognitive laziness/shortcuts. But such a draw/reaching for a tie is a counterfactual to most.

References

Abbreviations