Benefiting at work from Brain Based Insights

You may be surprised to discover that what you anticipate impacts what you remember.  Emotional experiences … we already know … are easier to remember than routine or everyday events.

Jack Nitschke,  professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is pictured here with a computer-projected image of a human brain.  He and other researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison discovered that anticipation of a fearful situation can spark two specific memory-forming regions of the brain - even before that event has occurred.

Interestingly, this research shows that anticipation likely factors into how fresh the memory of emotional experiences remain.

Could this study help us to understand memory as it relates to anticipation and emotion. Who would have guessed that the power of expectancy would extend to memory formation? That means that a person who fears speaking will likely gight anxiety before any presentation. Anxiety that results from these memories seem to set off vicious cycle …  because the stronger a person’s  memory of discomfort … the worse that person’s  performance is likely to fall.

Two regions of the brain - the amygdala and the hippocampus - are activated when a person anticipates tough situations. Researchers suspect the amygdala is associated with the formation of emotional memories, while the hippocampus enables the brain to form long-term recollections.

This study found that the more activated amygdala and hippocampus during the anticipation …  the more likely you will remember details of the event.

When scientists met 2 weeks later with subjects to measure how well they remembered the same disturbing images … they discovered that people who best remembered them had shown the greatest amygdala and hippocampus activity during the picture-viewing exercise two weeks before.

In other words…  those subjects' brains had already coverted short-term memories of the images into longer-lasting ones. It’s as if the anticipation of unpleasant events kick-starts an "arousal or fear circuitry" in the brain. This fear circuit reinforces old memories. The key is to dampen a person’s arousal response so that they do not evoke negative memories easily.

It also seems to suggest that the less emotionally aroused person can deal better with fear. Emotions and anticipation habits … in this way … could work for or against you at work…. What do you think?