Manage Stress for Brain Fitness
Stress reorganizes brain circuits and can leave you even deeper in a rut. Worse, it may change how your brain is wired, and in a bad way. An article published in Science shows that stressed animals tend to make decisions based on habit rather than by taking outcomes into account.
Dias-Ferreira and his colleagues looked at what happens in the brains of rats subjected to stress and required to do a task in which they were reinforced for a specific outcome (something like running in a maze to get a piece of cheese).
Stressed animals didn’t change their behavior in relation to changes outcomes. So they tended to persist in a behavior even if the rewards changed.
Dias-Ferreira and his colleagues also looked at the rat’s brains. The stressed rats showed atrophy of the prefrontal cortex, and more nerve cells and connections in the striatum. That’s significant, because the prefrontal cortex is where many researchers believe that decisions are made. It’s where we can stop and think about where we’re going and decide to keep doing the same thing or try something different. The striatum, on the other hand, is the part of the brain that probably supports an habitual action (like running a specific direction in a maze).
While it’s always a jump from animal research to human behavior, the parallel between this study and what we see in humans are striking. When we’re stressed, we’re much less likely to try something new. This is true even if a situation is changing, and the same rewards aren’t likely to occur.
The study also shows why trying out new things may be important for brain fitness. Trying out new behaviors, or learning something new, is more likely to activate the prefrontal cortex. That’s a good thing for brain fitness.
The moral to this story has two parts: (1) Manage your stress and (2) try new things to maintain your brain fitness.
Reference:
Dias-Ferreira et al (2009). Chronic stress causes frontostriatal reorganization and affects decision-making. Science, 325, 5940, 621-625.
