Acute stress improves working memory, research suggests

Stress is no fun. Chronic stress can ruin your health. But the body’s response to troubling situations is not without benefit. New research shows that after a brief encounter with a stressful scenario, the resulting acute stress actually makes you smarter. Or at least it improves the working memory of rats by ramping up production of neurotransmitters in the prefrontal cortex, a key region of the brain controlling emotion and cognition.

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