Anyone who has felt the mind seize and creak and turn cold when the heat is on – say in the middle of a job interview or when your crush catches you off guard with an impromptu opener – knows the score.
Despite knowing the right thing to say – even sometimes having rehearsed for the moment – the answer gets stuck somewhere along the way as the mind turns over and sputters like a diesel engine on a frosty morning.
As it turns out, there is solid science to explain how and why this can happen to the best of us. According to researchers based at the University of Hamburg, “acute stress” can break up the process by which the brain “automatically compares new information with existing memories and links them together.”
The result is a disruption to the system by which the brain integrates disparate pieces of information in our memory to help us build knowledge.
“We examined for the first time how this state alters the integration of related information and were able to show in our study that existing memories are less likely to be reactivated during overlapping experiences under stress, so that they tend to be differentiated from one another rather than integrated,” said Lars Schwabe, cognitive psychology professor at the University of Hamburg.
The research was published in the journal Science Advances in late May by Schwabe and colleagues at the University of Texas in the United States and the Netherlands’ Radboud University Medical Centre in Nijmegen.
The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan brains and in particular the hippocampus, the region central to memory processes, for how it linked information when put under the simulated stress of a mock job interview and maths problem.
Stress “impairs inference by both reducing the degree to which past memories are reactivated during new learning and leading to their differentiation, rather than integration,” the team explained in the paper, pointing out that their findings have “broad implications for educational, legal and clinical settings.”
“The linking of related information is the foundation for long-term learning success,” according to Schwabe. – dpa
