The first point, of course, is that mild to moderate short-term stressors enhance memory. This makes sense, in that this is the sort of optimal stress that we would call “stimulation”—alert and focused. This effect has been shown in laboratory animals and in humans. One particularly elegant study in this realm was carried out by Larry Cahill and James McGaugh at the University of California at Irvine. Read a fairly unexciting story to a group of control subjects: a boy and his mother walk through their town, pass this store and that one, cross the street and enter the hospital where the boy’s
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