Well worth a watch is a short TED talk by neuropsychologist Nicole Byers called
How Stress Drains Your Brain — and What To Do About It. If you've been faced with a lot of stress and find yourself forgetting simple things like people's names or other bits of info, the simple advice here may help.
Before the final few suggestions towards the end of the 9-minute video, Nicole covers the science (in simple terms) on how the brain is affected by stress and distractions.
Some of the main points I found interesting were:
- The human brain can store 2.5 million gigabytes of data (equal to about 5,000 iPhones).
- She tells an anecdote of a "10-second-Tom" who, after a successful brain surgery for seizures, couldn't remember performing tasks multiple times but still got better at them over time. This demonstrates that we have different types of memories.
- Some memories are more prone to interference.
- Our short-term memory is very small, and easily affected by distractions.
- Mentally juggling too many things means we're more likely to make a memory error.
- Stresses take up brain space, forcing us into mental multi-tasking.
- Trying to work faster to compensate for distractions makes us more stressed.
- Stress doesn't just affect memory retrieval – it makes it harder for our brains to solve problems.
The advice she gives is pretty simple: If you're forgetting things, just take some time for a mental reset. Do something else. Think about something other than the problem at hand. And don't try to "think harder" – this just makes the situation worse because it blocks the brain cells needed for mental retrieval.
Hope the video helps you if it's something you've been struggling with of late!
Now on to this week's hand-picked productivity links!
