Stress disrupts hippocampal integration of overlapping events, memory inference

People who study human memory have also known this for a long while. That is not the novelty of the finding. The novelty is the bridging of a memory paradigm of transitive inference which I believe has been shown to critically depend on hippocampal binding operations, and the effect of stress on that memory supporting hippocampal operation. I've been out of the memory field for about 10 years now moving on to autism research, but was very much exclusively in the hippocampal-dependent memory research field during my phD work. This is a good research team, and I have colleagues who have worked with some of the authors (e.g. Allison Preston). In any case, this is the type of study that is much much much more focused on current theory of a hippocampal operations supporting memory than non-hippocampal contributions (e.g. encoding / retrieval mnemonics, etc). The point is that the take home for scientists in the field won't be much like what a news clip might write about the study (but props to the submitter for giving the actual study link!)

As an interesting (and yes, a bit sad) twist on that notion - and, if I may say so, coincidentally a bit of a bridge between my comment-fellow SubiculumCode's two different areas of research - my personal empirical experience was that between ages 6-13 I had a stepfather who routinely dispensed physical punishment/discipline.

One of the harshest applications was around academic performance. If I had any bad marks, or a teacher reported sluggish work or improper behaviour, it wasn't good.

And whether as result of personal talent (ha!), or simply through being beaten and fear-driven into learned intensity, you'd better believe I was the top of my class or close to it most of the time.

But the stress part-destroyed my social abilities and integration (as opposed to academic learning), and along with other unusual childhood stressors and instability I suffered, is the biggest reason why later I spent most of my adulthood walking my own path - to the extent of being considered autistic.

Yet elite universities revel in making learning experience as stressful as possible.

I don’t think we should miss the forest for the trees. If you incentivize people to publish as much as possible, and institutions to apply as little oversight as possible, and peers to positively review and cite as much as possible, you end up with a system that produces a huge volume of the easiest “science” to produce over quality, meaningful work. Modern academia is mostly a ponzi scheme and that’s that.

I think that's overcomplicating the issue. Ultimately, good science takes time, and the academic culture doesn't allow for that.

It's someone up there looking at previous great human achievements and expecting them instead of helping them happen. The philosophy of value capture is the term. Get people who are influential or otherwise able and squeeze it out of them for the immediate profit.

I think the main value will be the end of tenuous illnesses like ADHD because they can understand the mechanisms in the brain and finally get rid of these absolutely archaic questionnaire diagnostics

Very obvious Claude.