Stress has long been pegged as the enemy of attention, disrupting focus and doing substantial damage to working memory -- the short-term juggling of information that allows us to do all the little things that make us productive. By watching individual neurons at work, a group of psychologists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed just how stress can addle the mind, as well as how neurons in the brain’s prefrontal cortex help “remember” information in the first place.
