Anxiety Can Help You Remember

A new study conducted at the University of Waterloo has determined that manageable levels of anxiety can actually help your ability to remember details of events. It was also found that when anxiety levels increase to an unmanageable level or when anxiety turns into fear, it could lead to people remembering primarily what is associated with the negative mood state.  Also, they are likely to interpret neutral aspects of their experiences as being associated with the anxiety or fear as well as with thoughts, beliefs and interpretations related to their high anxiety level.

The study showed that participants who were high in anxiety displayed a heightened sensitivity to the effects of emotional context on their memory. Neutral details were interpreted according to the emotion experienced while encoding the information. This means that thinking about highly emotional events or negative events could cause you to develop a negative mindset that alters the way you perceive your environment.  

It is important for us to be aware of how our mood states might be affecting how we view and interact with the world.  This may not be possible to do when in the actual mood state.  Instead, trying to think about this relationship when not in the fearful or anxious state of mind might better enable us to see how our views were changed when experiencing the negative mood and better understand the connection.  The more we are aware of this relationship the better we will be at perceiving it during negative mood states as well.

The ability to manage your anxiety however, can lead to positive outcomes.  When we perceive our anxiety as controllable we do not experience it as severely as when we believe it to be out of our control. When it is manageable it doesn’t become the primary focus of our lives because we know we can always do something about it should it become necessary.  

Unmanageable or uncontrollable anxiety, on the other hand, leads to distress and a constant focus on the mood state since we feel overwhelmed by the anxiety and constantly worry it will get worse.  This attention to the anxiety makes it the center of our world and thus, everything becomes colored by it.  The moral of this study is that it is important to work on learning as many coping strategies for managing anxiety as possible. While we can’t get rid of all the anxiety and stress in our world, by learning how to control it and decrease it, we will be more likely to experience the positive effects of anxiety on our memory.

It is also important for educator to be aware that there could be anxiety related factors that influence student ability to remember the material they are being taught. Lightening the mood while teaching could be beneficial for students, especially those who experience high levels of school and performance related anxiety.  

References

Lee, C., & Fernandes, M., (2017).. Emotional Encoding Context Leads to Memory Bias in Individuals with High Anxiety. Brain Sciences, 8 (2): 6 DOI: 10.3390/brainsci8010006

Unsynchronized Brain Waves During Sleep Make Us Forget

Likened to a tennis serve where the ball toss and the racket swing must coordinate
perfectly to score an ace, overnight brain waves must sync properly for remembering
to occur, a new study finds.  As with everything, it’s all about timing.  While slow
and fast brain waves are integrated and balanced in younger adults, when we age
slow waves that occur during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep fail to fully
coordinate with quick electrical bursts known as spindles.

Using tennis terminology, the slow waves are like the toss of the ball, while the fast

waves are like the swing of the racket. If either of these two components are off in
terms of rhythm, the serve will either travel short or long in terms of distance, or go
out of bounds or the racket might even fail to make contact with the ball completely.
In sleep, this mistiming prevents older adults from being able to save new memories.  
These findings explain way older adults often seem able to better remember things
that occurred in the past rather than those that recently occurred.  The study also
suggests that this problem is the result of atrophy of the medial frontal cortex, an
area in the brain responsible for deep sleep which is restorative.  

The good news from this study is that there is now hope for a potential treatment
that could help with memory loss in aging adults.  New studies are being undertaken
to examine the effects of applying electrical stimulation to the frontal lobe of the
brain in an effort to synchronize slow waves with spindles   According to the studies
senior author Matthew Walker, “By electrically boosting these nighttime brainwaves,
we hope to restore some degree of healthy deep sleep in the elderly and those with
dementia, and in doing so, salvage aspects of their learning and memory,"

Source

Helfrich, R. F., Mander, B. A., Jagust, W. J., Knight, R. T. & Walker, M. P. (2017). Old Brains Come Uncoupled in Sleep:  Slow Wave - Spindle Synchrony, Brain Atrophy and Forgetting.. Neuron.  

New Study Shows Cannabis Reverses Aging in the Brain

In a monumental new study, conducted through a joint effort at the University of Bonn with researchers from The Hebrew University, Cannabis was shown to reverse aging processes in the brains of mice.  Old animals that showed memory loss and other brain related problems due to age were given low doses of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient of Cannabis.  The treated mice were shown to regress to a state that would be seen in two month old mice.

In this study, aging mice aged 12 and 18 months old were given a low daily dose of (THC).  After only four weeks, the treated mice displayed behavioral signs indicating a reversal of aging related cognitive impairments including learning and memory and learning difficulties.  When examining the brain tissue of treated mice on a genetic level, they determined the behavioral changes reflected real neurological changes at a molecular level.  Conversely, the mice who received placebos continued to display age related declines in performance reflecting the normal aging process.

Human trials are not yet in the works, as more animal studies need to be done to determine safety of long term use of the agent and potential undiscovered side effects. Additionally given the low dose used for this study, it appears using Cannabis for recreation will not improve memory.  At the same time earlier studies have demonstrated that cannabis is effective at decreasing brain inflammation while improving cognition and can help to control chronic pain.

While human trials may be a long time in coming, the findings from this study may bring us one step closer to understanding and treating normal and abnormal aging related changes to the brain. Subsequent research could eventually open up a range of new options for treating and possibly reversing brain aging in humans.  Should support be found for the use of the active agent in Cannabis for aging related memory problems, it could provide hope for those suffering from dementia, most cases of which are currently progressive and irreversible.  The study is published in the May issue of Nature Medicine.