Throughout human history, every era and history has had its own stresses and problems. As a matter of fact, this criterion did not depend only on the time period. Every geography, country, society, class, gender, certain age ranges have various problems that are unique or common. As humans, we sometimes experience problems arising from competition, sometimes from impossibilities, and sometimes from events that we cannot understand.
Stress, a concept that was defined in the 17th century and is frequently pronounced in modern life today, is the name of the negative feelings that are revealed in our inner world as a result of the problems we experience and that we reflect to other environments with our expression. Our memory, in which information, experiences and emotions are recorded, reveals our experiences of stress rather than positive or neutral experiences in our daily or long-term lives. Have you ever wondered why?
A ‘stress test’ was performed:
Researchers at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum (RUB) investigated the causes of this condition. The team, led by Anne Bierbrauer, Professor Oliver Wolf and Professor Nikolai Axmacher from the RUB Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience, analyzed moments of stress with a test called the Trier Social Stress Test. Using this test, the researchers tried to record a memory trace of a real event in their experiments. During the test, participants participated in the job interview simulation, speaking before an application committee, all of whom wore neutral expressions and did not give any positive feedback. This situation triggered a great deal of stress in the participants.
During the job interview simulation, the admissions committee used some everyday objects. For example, one of the committee members took a sip of his coffee. A day later, the researchers showed the objects to participants in both groups while recording their brain activity. Stressed out participants remembered objects better than the control group.
Along with the test, the researchers examined brain activity in the amygdala. According to the data obtained, while the traces of some moments and images associated with stressful moments left a very similar memory trace, such a situation was not observed in the observations made in the control group. In other words, the human brain encodes and connects images of stressful moments in a ‘special and powerful’ way. This makes it easier to remember these images, which are separated from other images.
Nikolai Axmacher, a member of the research team, stated that as a result of the research, committee members triggered stress during the interview and that there was a very important link between objects and stress triggers for memory. While another researcher, Oliver Wolf, said that stressful experiences have detailed images in our minds, Anne Bierbrauer stated that stressful memories are very similar to each other and different memory representations may be the key to stronger memories.
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