A new study has found that stress disrupts human thinking. The findings, published this month in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.
The new study, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the stressed students’ brains, is a robust example of how basic research in an animal model can lead to high-tech investigations of the human brain.
Previous experiments had found that stressed rats foraging for food had similar impairments and that those problems resulted from stress-induced changes in their brain anatomy.
Bruce S. McEwen, head of the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at The Rockefeller University, said that “It’s a great translational story.”
Both worked on the project with colleagues at Weill Cornell Medical College. “The research in the rats led to the imaging work on people, and the results matched up remarkably well.”
In earlier research on rats, neuroscientists found that these two tasks place demands on different circuits in the brain, and the circuits are affected in different ways by stress.
The new research suggests that something very similar may happen to distressed humans.
