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POLITIKOFF

Why our brains don't function well in high-pressure situations

Politiko 2026-06-16 16:19:13

Why our brains don't function well in high-pressure situations

Anyone who has felt their mind freeze, crackle, and cool down when the heat is turned on—say, in the middle of a job interview or when your girlfriend catches you off guard with an impromptu opening sentence—knows the result.

Despite knowing the right thing to say - sometimes even after trying it for a moment - the answer gets stuck somewhere along the way, as the mind revs and works like a diesel engine on a cold morning.

As it turns out, there's solid science to explain how and why this can happen to even the best of us. According to researchers based at the University of Hamburg, "acute stress" can disrupt the process by which the brain "automatically compares new information with existing memories and links them together."

The result is a disruption of the system by which the brain integrates different pieces of information in our memory to help us build knowledge.

"We examined for the first time how this condition 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 they tend to differentiate from each other rather than integrate," said Lars Schwabe, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Hamburg.

The research was published in the journal Science Advances at the end of May by Schwabe and his colleagues at the University of Texas in the US and the Netherlands' Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen.

The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brain, and in particular the hippocampus, the central region of memory processes, to see how it connected information when put under the simulated stress of a mock job interview and a math problem.

Stress “impairs inference making by reducing the extent to which past memories are reactivated during new learning and leading to their differentiation, rather than integration,” the team explained in the paper, noting that their findings have “broad implications for educational, legal, and clinical settings.”

"Connecting information is the foundation for long-term learning success," according to Schwabe./ DPA News.

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