Our blank page, however, changes everything. At the moment where your performance is judged, your brain realizes that it had better get its act in gear. As a result, every memory you recall gets a squirt of memory-boosting chemicals. Those memories are reactivated, your amygdala calls for hormones, your hippocampus maps out the involved networks, and your neurons wire tightly together. Every time you succeed at recalling, the reward centers in your brain release a chemical reward—dopamine—into your hippocampus, further encouraging long-term memory storage. Your blank sheet of paper has created
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