How Stress Affects the Brain

Of Rats and Men: How Stress Affects the Brain link
Bill Jenkins
November 1, 2011

Studies have shown that stress seems to affect rat and human brains in the same ways. Under stress, nerve cells of the prefrontal cortex shrink, resulting in slower performance on attention-shifting tasks. But, an interesting twist, there apparently seems to be the opposite reaction with the neurons in the frontal cortex which are believed to affect our response-reversal tasks (where we are able to change our answers to questions depending on context). The studies also showed that once the stress is gone our brains bounce back to normal relatively fast.