Stress, anxiety both boon and bane to brain

A cold dose of fear lends an edge to the here-and-now — say, when things go bump in the night. "That edge sounds good. It sounds adaptive. It sounds like perception is enhanced and that it can keep you safe in the face of danger," says Alexander Shackman, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But it sounds like there's also a catch, one that Shackman and his coauthors — including Richard Davidson , UW-Madison psychology and psychiatry professor — described in the Jan. Journal of Neuroscience. "It makes us more sensitive to our external surroundings as a way of learning where or what a threat may be, but interferes with our ability to do more complex thinking," Davidson says.