Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain's Chief Command Center (preview)
Neural circuits responsible for conscious self-control are highly vulnerable to even mild stress. When they shut down, primal impulses go unchecked and mental paralysis sets in
?| April 9, 2012?|
Image: Photograph by Dan Saelinger
In Brief
- Freezing under stress, a common experience for all of us at some point in our life, has its roots in a loss of control over ?executive functions? that allow us to control our emotions.
- Prefrontal cortical areas, which serve as the brain?s executive command centers, normally hold our emotions in check by sending signals to tone down activity in primitive brain systems.
- Under even everyday stresses, the prefrontal cortex can shut down, allowing the amyg?dala, a locus for regulating emotional activity, to take over, inducing mental paralysis and panic.
- Researchers are probing further the physiology of acute stress and are considering behavioral and pharmaceutical interventions to help us retain composure when the going gets tough.
The entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience?known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms?is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer?s block or struggled through a lengthy exam.