Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference(science.org)
science.org
Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea5496?user_id=66c4bf745d78644b3aa57b08
25 comments
People in the Education field have known that stress hampers learning for a long time ... but it's still nice to see empirical results.
People who study human memory have also known this for a long while. That is not the novelty of the finding. The novelty is the bridging of a memory paradigm of transitive inference which I believe has been shown to critically depend on hippocampal binding operations, and the effect of stress on that memory supporting hippocampal operation. I've been out of the memory field for about 10 years now moving on to autism research, but was very much exclusively in the hippocampal-dependent memory research field during my phD work. This is a good research team, and I have colleagues who have worked with some of the authors (e.g. Allison Preston). In any case, this is the type of study that is much much much more focused on current theory of a hippocampal operations supporting memory than non-hippocampal contributions (e.g. encoding / retrieval mnemonics, etc). The point is that the take home for scientists in the field won't be much like what a news clip might write about the study (but props to the submitter for giving the actual study link!)
As an interesting (and yes, a bit sad) twist on that notion - and, if I may say so, coincidentally a bit of a bridge between my comment-fellow SubiculumCode's two different areas of research - my personal empirical experience was that between ages 6-13 I had a stepfather who routinely dispensed physical punishment/discipline.
One of the harshest applications was around academic performance. If I had any bad marks, or a teacher reported sluggish work or improper behaviour, it wasn't good.
And whether as result of personal talent (ha!), or simply through being beaten and fear-driven into learned intensity, you'd better believe I was the top of my class or close to it most of the time.
But the stress part-destroyed my social abilities and integration (as opposed to academic learning), and along with other unusual childhood stressors and instability I suffered, is the biggest reason why later I spent most of my adulthood walking my own path - to the extent of being considered autistic.
One of the harshest applications was around academic performance. If I had any bad marks, or a teacher reported sluggish work or improper behaviour, it wasn't good.
And whether as result of personal talent (ha!), or simply through being beaten and fear-driven into learned intensity, you'd better believe I was the top of my class or close to it most of the time.
But the stress part-destroyed my social abilities and integration (as opposed to academic learning), and along with other unusual childhood stressors and instability I suffered, is the biggest reason why later I spent most of my adulthood walking my own path - to the extent of being considered autistic.
Yet elite universities revel in making learning experience as stressful as possible.
Not just elite! But don't worry, there's a councilor thats on hand that if you hold off on your mental health crisis for a few weeks and see you once.
Of course they do - they're in the credentialing business.
There is some real world value to selecting for people whose learning is more resilient under pressure
Is it worth sacrificing / compromising entire careers (or in some cases lives) over? Quite the high overhead little data collection.
What is it?
Credentials being positively correlated with resilience and having learned things would be great.
It's too bad that's not what the institutions are doing.
It's too bad that's not what the institutions are doing.
I don't know about that. Even Harvard has a big grade inflation problem. And non-elite colleges are trying to make it as effortless as possible to get a degree.
grade inflation is the right thing to do as long as employers and post graduate schools keep looking at grades or gpa. if you do strict "fair" evaluation you put your students at a disadvantage compared to same level students at other schools that grade more relaxed. grades should be feedback not something to compare with others instead we should set up a standard state exam (pass/fail, unlimited cheap retakes) to decide if you get a degree. but until that happens keep on inflating
People in the education field have casually dismissed substantive studies for a long time, too.
The study itself acknowledges prior research in the area, and is far beyond mere empirical results confirming a hunch educators have had (and insufficiently addressed) for a long time.
The study itself acknowledges prior research in the area, and is far beyond mere empirical results confirming a hunch educators have had (and insufficiently addressed) for a long time.
I wonder if it helps explain in part why the Publish or Perish culture is wrecking science and stalling scientific progress. The stressful environment it tends to create it's not conductive to learning and thinking in depth.
I think that's overcomplicating the issue. Ultimately, good science takes time, and the academic culture doesn't allow for that.
I don’t think we should miss the forest for the trees. If you incentivize people to publish as much as possible, and institutions to apply as little oversight as possible, and peers to positively review and cite as much as possible, you end up with a system that produces a huge volume of the easiest “science” to produce over quality, meaningful work. Modern academia is mostly a ponzi scheme and that’s that.
This also kinda makes me think back to how most of the influential thinkers we know didn’t make their impact in the structures we know today.
Makes me wonder if most of the prestige and “remnants” of those eras are actually just competitive pressure cookers that may not provide the environment anymore for the achievements they once enabled.
It's someone up there looking at previous great human achievements and expecting them instead of helping them happen. The philosophy of value capture is the term. Get people who are influential or otherwise able and squeeze it out of them for the immediate profit.
Wonder if this relates to prolonged period(s) of high stress being often related to later development of dementia.
cleaned up url: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea5496
This is not to deny the value of the research, but even if everyone were told these facts, it would be difficult to change the flawed education system.
I think the main value will be the end of tenuous illnesses like ADHD because they can understand the mechanisms in the brain and finally get rid of these absolutely archaic questionnaire diagnostics
I wonder why the comment by aaronyi is dead. It's a reasonable, probably informative comment. Is it AI?
Very obvious Claude.