Stress stops the brain from joining the dots between memories

Hello Nature readers,
Today we learn that stress impairs the brain’s ability to link memories, hear a call to invest in early science education and consider whether we’re entering an era of ‘secretive’ research into artificial intelligence.

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Stress stops the brain joining the dots

Acute stress makes it difficult to connect memories of past experiences with fresh information — a process crucial for making deductions. This could explain why people struggle to show insight under pressure. During psychological tests that involved making links between indirectly related pictures, brain imaging showed altered activity in the hippocampi of people who had been through a stressful mock interview compared with those of people who’d had to complete a simpler task, which suggests that their brains hadn’t inferred connections between the images as strongly.

The brain is no machine

In The Brain, In Theory, neuroscientist Romain Brette makes the case to move away from the predominant model of the brain, which treats the organ like a computer. Brette argues that engineering metaphors are often vague and misleading, and attempts to breathe life back into brain science by focusing the study of the nervous system on biology. “Brette’s take-down of the field’s dominant theoretical frameworks is systematic,” writes neuroscientist Àlex Gómez-Marín in his review. “The book is intense and intricate. One can get lost in it, but it is worth the adventure.”

Innovation starts in schools

Countries hoping to cultivate talent to drive innovation need to invest in primary- and secondary-school science education, argue three education researchers. Such investment could enable schools to replace conventional teaching with projects that engage students in how science is actually done. The shift also requires a sustained investment in science teachers, providing them with the necessary training and professional development to facilitate a broader science-learning ecosystem. “Countries that neglect these investments might still build excellent labs. They will find it much harder to build the talent that those labs need,” the authors write.