Page 94 - The Memory Program How to Prevent Memory Loss and Enhance Memory Power

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ple— may feel severely stressed because of monotony and lack of stimulation.

Most studies of stress have been conducted in young adults, usually undergraduate volunteers who
earn a few dollars for experiments run by their professors. These studies show that if you are
extremely anxious, performance on tests of cognition, including tests of memory, falters. At the other
extreme, a very casual attitude totally devoid of nerves leads to an equally poor performance,
probably because of lack of attention and focus. The best performance is produced if you are slightly
anxious about doing well on the test but can still stay calm and think clearly while under the gun. To
produce peak intellectual performance you need to focus and yet stay fairly cool, a combination that
is not always easy to achieve.

When experiencing extreme emotional states, a person's recall can be quite different from what
really happened at the time of the incident. Conflicts between family and friends are often
precipitated by such highly emotion-laden events, and the warring parties may have completely
different memories of the same incident. These contradictory memories lead to opposite viewpoints,
which escalates the battle, because each side is convinced that the other side is lying outright or
blatantly distorting the facts.

How does recall of an event become so far removed from the truth? The best explanation is that
the nerve connections from the limbic system that convey emotional tone to a memory become so
overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions felt during the event that they either begin to misfire or
are recorded inaccurately in the hippocampus, frontal lobe, and related regions. In other words,
instead of the initial memory trace becoming accurately hardwired into long-term storage, the
extreme emotional state drastically alters the course of nerve transmission and a distorted memory
becomes hardwired in the brain. After this faulty memory is deposited in the brain bank, it becomes
extremely difficult to change the individual's perception of what really happened, as I am sure you
recognize from highly stressful episodes in your own life. The same process can occur in a court of
law, where a witness who saw an event in a state of extreme emotion has inaccurate recall on the
witness stand. This distortion may not be deliberate perjury but a direct result of the memory trace
having been hardwired improperly into the witness's hippocampus and frontal lobes. Similar
mechanisms can distort the recall of repressed memories of perceived, or real, sexual or physical
abuse.