Today's topic is stress and memory. Specifically, aspects of stress and memory that aren't great for us.
Think about your views about the world. When do you consider changing them? It turns out that when we're under stress, we start thinking that maybe we should drop our current understanding of the world and adopt something new.
Consider this image in front of you. This is called white noise. Sometimes we refer to white noise as full spectrum sound or something like that. But this is also considered white noise. Lots of randomly created white and black dots.
Now, imagine we do an experiment and I show you this and ask if you see an image. You say, yes or no, and I show you another one and each time, it's slightly different. Let's say I showed you twenty of those. At the end, we can ask, how many images did you see in something that doesn't have images it is just randomly placed dots.
What do you think happens when people are more stressed out? One experiment involved people who were about to go skydiving. What happened as people got closer to skydiving? As people get more stressed, we see more patterns. Why? Imagine you're an animal in the jungle, many years ago, and you think that there might be a tiger. Your system wants to go into hyperdrive and look at every little thing and say, “Oh, these two leaves moving. It's a pattern. There's a tiger behind it. This thing is moving and this thing is moving. Maybe there's a tiger there.”
So, when we are under stress, and I don't mean the kind of stress that says, I have lots of email to respond to. Rather, when we don't understand what's going on—under those conditions, our system goes into hyperdrive and wants to understand what is going on. This is why stress causes us to say, “Maybe I don't understand the world, let me look for a pattern to understand what is going on.” Under stress, we overinterpret patterns and we imagine that there are things behind them that might not be there.
I also said we'll look at memory. What's the issue with memory here? If you're an animal in the jungle and think, “Oh, maybe two of these leaves are connected to a tiger.” And you run away. By the next day, you have forgotten about it. Maybe even two hours later, you have forgotten about it. You don't return and say, “Let me look at those two leaves again.” But as a person with a good memory, you say, “Oh, maybe this and this are connected with Bill Gates, the government, the Illuminati, etc.” And then you search online and you find some things that support your ideas. And the next day, you remember it.
So, animals have this patternicity. When under stress, they look for more patterns. But animals look at it fresh every day. We humans don't. We look at every day as a function of what we did the day before. So, that means that if we're stressed on day one and we start looking for patterns, we might find something and come to a conclusion. Not that it's a tiger in the bush, but we may think that pharma is doing X, the U.S. government is doing Y, the Russian government is doing this, the—whatever. The next day, we don't start from scratch. We start from where we ended the day before, and it's easier for us to take another step and another step and another step further.
That is one way in which stress really wreaks havoc on our understanding of the world. Our memory aids us in going down a path that is not good for us. Now, I'm not recommending having no memory, but we do have to understand that those two things don't play well with each other. Stress and memory together can take normal, kind, wonderful people and start us down the path in believing all kinds of things that are really not that good for us.
