Tapping into the same neural pathways and reward centres that make people yearn for chocolate or nicotine, it ramps up the activity of dopamine, which in turn strengthens memories.
As such, stress strengthens memories of potential significance for the organism's survival, e.g. to deal better and earlier with the stressor the next time.
That maxim from medical education, although rarely unpacked theoretically, is in fact strongly supported from a large number of psychological studies of the 'testing effect', in which retrieving information from memory, as in any form of testing, itself strengthens memories.
Terror during trauma focuses one's attention, strengthening memory for the most salient features of the experience, and occasionally at the expense of less salient ones as the phenomenon of "weapon focus" illustrates.
The Posit Science software, sold commercially under the names Brain Fitness Program and InSight, is supposed to strengthen memory, attention, language skills and visual-spatial abilities in aging adults.
The idea behind many popular video and online "brain-training" games is that practicing tasks that strengthen memory, attention and other mental processes will make you a smarter person.
