Hi Everyone,

I wanted to thank all of you for your support for my book Brainsights and give you a little preview of what is in the book.  Today's preview is on memory.

There has been a lot of talk about memory in the press lately with the events going on in the US and the Supreme Court.  The memory is a fascinating subject and one that I enjoyed researching for the book.  Today I want to give you a bit from the book about the impact of emotion and stress on memory... Hope you enjoy this snippet.  David

Many of us would probably think that stress would have a decidedly negative impact on memory, but what the research shows is this is not always the case.

Memory can be positively impacted by stress, helping to encode memories to our brains in emotionally arousing experiences.  In a study from the University of California published in 2003 found that stress did enhance human memory. The researchers showed participants 21 slides from the “International Affective Picture System (IAPS)” which is a standardized database of pictures used in psychological research to study emotion and attention. They had participants view slides and induced stress using the cold pressor stress (CPS) method which plunges the participant's hand into a bowl of ice water for one minute. It is a well-known and reliable method for inducing stress and reliably producing the stress hormone cortisol in most humans.

They then tested the number of slides each participant could successfully recall. A successful recall was defined as an unmistakable description of what they saw.

The findings showed that those that were administered the stressful CPS after viewing the 21 slides had a significant increase in recall compared to a control group. On average the stressed group recalled 9.2 slides compared with the non-stressed groups 7.9 slide recall.  A 1.3 slide difference out of 21 slides might not sound like a big deal, but statistically, it is a highly significant and proof that stress can help us to commit to memory information.  (Cahill, 2003)

We see how lower levels of stress can enhance our memories if induced at a specific time in the memory commit process.  However, other research has shown that high-stress can also disrupt memory.

A study conducted by the University of Arizona and published in 2006 found that memory was positively impacted by stress for emotional aspects of an event but was a disruptor for non-emotional attributes of the same event.  (Payne, et al., 2006)

Researchers concluded that stress for an emotional experience will help to strengthen or preserve that memory, but it also tends to negatively impact the recall of the “neutral” elements of the emotional experience.  It is common for people with traumatic experiences to recall with vivid memory the emotionally charged details of an event, but to report gaps in their memory and general memory impairment around details that don’t have the heavy emotional connection.  Memories formed under conditions of high-stress are not the same as those that are formed under ordinary emotional circumstances.  (Payne, et al., 2006)

For many years I used the research findings from Dutch Psychologist Susanne Piët that anything not connected to emotion is forgotten in 18 seconds or less as a part of my sales pitch to organizations for using experiential training.

Dr. Piët was brought to my attention by one of the Dutch participants in a leadership program of mine who asked me if I knew her, because what we were doing fit so perfectly with her research.  I had not, but on investigation saw that this was exactly why our programs worked.

In the experiential roleplays we designed for participants there was always an emotional component to them.  The person they were meeting in the roleplay was angry, depressed, or indifferent and this made the experience not only more realistic but challenging.

There was also a clear element of stress in the roleplays.  We asked people to undertake difficult situations and my colleagues and I (all professional coaches) were there to make it difficult and challenging, and after several years of practice in being difficult employees, we were very good at it. We twisted words around and put people consistently in the “hot seat” to disrupt their S2 brains and keep them from fully delivering what they had planned to solve the problem at hand.  We were simulating the unpredictability of people in real-life.

I found very quickly that the reason people to our programs always felt that they got a lot out of the program was because we successfully combined the elements of emotion and stress to help them commit information to memory.