UC BERKELEY (US) — Acute stress that’s short-lived, not chronic, primes the brain for improved performance, according to new research.
“You always think about stress as a really bad thing, but it’s not,” says Daniela Kaufer, associate professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley. “Some amounts of stress are good to push you just to the level of optimal alertness, behavioral and cognitive performance.”
In studies on rats, they found that significant, but brief stressful events caused stem cells in their brains to proliferate into new nerve cells that, when mature two weeks later, improved the rats’ mental performance.