by Gabby Colby-George Have you ever experienced a lack of retaining information? Or maybe you don’t understand something you’ve just learned the day before. Well here’s what may be the problem. Photo There are many forms of stress. Each different type has a different effect on the brain. Short term stress affects a person’s ability to remember facts. Although in the moment you may feel like taking notes and listening to the information that’s being given, is working fine, you may come back and realize that your brain did not retain the written/spoken information as well as you’d thought. There are three important steps to learning new information; acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval. Although, moderate stress related to memory itself can have positive effects on the acquisition and consolidation processes in the brain. The brain releases corticosteroids when it is stressed which prompt the amygdala to tell the hippocampus (where memories are held) to put together memories. Moderate stress signals the brain that the information it is hearing is worth remembering. Now, chronic stress, causes the brain to be constantly bathed in corticosteroids, this damages the amygdala’s ability to make memories. When stressed people find it hard to create short-term memories as well as turn short-term memories into long-term memories. This is one of the many reasons that it is so hard to learn when stressed When someone experiences stress the prefrontal cortex fires in able to allow the flight, fight, or freeze mechanism to kick in. The prefrontal cortex is in charge of retrieving memories and that’s why when taking a stressful test, or trying to remember something in a stressful moment the brain may not be able to retrieve the needed information. Stress affects the types of memories that we create as well. Stress at an event may mean that we remember the bad/stressful parts of the event instead of remembering the happier/fun parts of the event, the brain struggles to remember accurate depictions of what happened at the event. This is only one reason that eye-witness statements are so unreliable. Scott, E. (n.d.). How Stress Works With-And Against-Your Memory. Retrieved from https://www.verywellmind.com/stress-and-your-memory-4158323 Photo Photo
1 Comment
Laura Russo
12/17/2018 09:01:54 am
This article is very interesting and well written. It is interesting to me that our brains will remember the more stressful parts of different events, rather than the most fun. I wonder if, for example, if someone who forgot their homework at home was stressed for the teacher to collect it at the end of class, would they retain any information at all, and if they do, how well did they understand? This would be an interesting experiment.
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