It’s the end of the term and you’re ready to face the big final exam you’ve been studying all month for. You’ve went to every lecture, read every chapter, and memorized every formula and key term there is to know. You’ve never felt more confident about a test before.

The big day arrives. You’re feeling a bit anxious. The test booklet lands in front of you … panic sets in.

You try to brush it off, but to no avail. Sitting with pencil in hand, you turn over the page of the exam booklet. You read over the first few questions. It happens: all the knowledge you thought you had up your head magically vanishes from your mental repository. There’s nothing up there. Nothing at all. It’s as if someone went into your brain and removed all traces of your prior learning.

You end up failing the test, despite all the preparation beforehand.

It’s a common occurrence that happens to many of us. Our ability to retrieve and encode information from stored memories can be quite easily hijacked by stressful situations. Stress is shown to annihilate our ability to retrieve old memories(link is external). It offers to a brain-based explanation for why we so often blank during these types of memory-related performances.

How and why does this happen, exactly? And perhaps more important, how can we overcome stress?

Recently, a team of neuroscientists sought to uncover the neural underpinnings of stress, learning, and memory retrieval.

– Neil Hobson Ph.D.

Read more: Why Your Brain on Stress Fails to Learn Properly

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