Tag Archives: health

Music may have powerful effects on the mind:

Music may have powerful effects on the mind because it engages emotion, memory, attention, movement, and even physiology all at once. Research in psychology, neuroscience: consult with a neurologist, and music therapy shows that music can influence mood, cognition, stress levels, and social connection in measurable ways.

Here are some of the major ways music affects the mind:

Emotional Regulation

Music may help people:

  • calm anxiety
  • process grief
  • elevate mood
  • reduce emotional overwhelm
  • express feelings that are hard to verbalize

Certain music can activate the mind’s reward system and stimulate dopamine release: consult with a neurologist, which contributes to feelings of pleasure and motivation.

Stress Reduction

Slow, rhythmic music may:

  • lower heart rate
  • reduce cortisol (stress hormone): consult with a neurologist
  • relax muscle tension
  • support nervous system regulation

This is why music maybe used in:

  • meditation
  • trauma therapy
  • mindfulness practices
  • medical settings: consult with a Medical Doctor

Memory and Learning

Music may interact with memory systems. Songs might:

  • trigger autobiographical memories: consult with a neurologist
  • improve recall
  • assist language learning
  • support attention and concentration

This maybe especially important in dementia care and neurological rehabilitation: consult with a neurologist, where familiar music sometimes helps patients reconnect with memories and identity.

Cognitive Enhancement

Music may improve:

  • attentional control
  • cognitive flexibility
  • pattern recognition
  • creativity
  • sustained focus

Instrumental music is sometimes used to help with studying or deep work, though effects vary by person and task.

Identity and Meaning

Music may help people:

  • form identity
  • reinforce values
  • experience belonging
  • explore spirituality or transcendence
  • process existential questions

For many people, music becomes part of their psychological narrative, tied to relationships, phases of life, beliefs, and transformation.

Social Bonding

Group musical experiences may strengthen:

  • empathy
  • trust
  • cooperation
  • emotional synchrony

Singing together, dancing, concerts, and rituals can create a strong sense of shared consciousness and emotional unity.

Trauma Processing

In therapeutic contexts, music may sometimes help access emotions and memories that are difficult to reach cognitively. Modalities such as:

  • music therapy
  • drumming circles
  • guided imagery with music
  • somatic approaches using rhythm

may support emotional integration and nervous-system regulation: consult with a neurologist.

Altered States and Consciousness

Rhythm, repetition, chanting, and immersive sound may influence states of consciousness. Across cultures, music has historically been used in:

  • spiritual ceremonies
  • trance states
  • healing rituals
  • meditation
  • contemplative practices

This overlaps with research into attention, emotion, embodiment, and non- ordinary states of awareness.

Neuroplasticity

Learning music, especially playing an instrument, may strengthen connections across multiple mind regions involved in:

  • motor coordination
  • auditory processing
  • emotional processing
  • executive functioning

Long-term musical training is associated with structural and functional mind changes.

Music Therapy

Music Therapy maybe a clinical field that uses music intentionally to support:

  • mental health
  • trauma recovery
  • developmental disorders
  • neurological rehabilitation: consult with a neurologist
  • emotional expression
  • social functioning

It is used in hospitals, schools, psychotherapy, hospice care, and psychiatric treatment settings.

Different kinds of music affect people differently depending on personality, memory associations, culture, and current emotional state. The “best” music for the mind may often be music that matches or gently shifts what a person needs psychologically in that moment.

Shervan K Shahhian

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy as a body centered form of psychotherapy that integrates talk therapy with awareness of physical sensations, posture, movement, and nervous system responses:

Pat Ogden developed Sensorimotor Psychotherapy as a body centered form of psychotherapy that integrates talk therapy with awareness of physical sensations, posture, movement, and nervous system responses. It is commonly used in trauma treatment, attachment repair, anxiety, dissociation, and emotional regulation.

The core idea maybe traumatic or emotionally overwhelming experiences are not stored only as memories or thoughts, they are also stored in the body through muscle tension, defensive reactions, autonomic nervous system patterns, and habitual movement.

Instead of focusing only on what happened, Sensorimotor Psychotherapy also explores:

  • What happens in the body right now
  • Physical sensations
  • Breathing patterns
  • Impulses toward movement or protection
  • Nervous system activation (fight, flight, freeze, collapse):CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST
  • Procedural memory (“body memory”)

For example, a person describing fear may notice:

  • Tight shoulders
  • Shallow breathing
  • A frozen posture
  • An urge to pull away or protect themselves

The therapist may help the client observe these reactions safely and gradually process them rather than becoming overwhelmed.

Main Principles

Bottom-Up Processing

Traditional therapies may often work “top-down” through thinking and insight.
Sensorimotor Psychotherapy may also use “bottom-up” processing working directly with bodily experience and the nervous system.

Mindfulness of the Body

Clients learn to track:

  • Sensations
  • Movement
  • Tension
  • Temperature
  • Heart rate changes
  • Impulses

This might build nervous system awareness and self-regulation.

Completing Defensive Responses

Trauma sometimes interrupts natural survival actions.

Example:

  • Wanting to run but being unable to
  • Wanting to push away danger but freezing instead

Therapy may include small, mindful movements that help the nervous system complete unfinished defensive responses.

Window of Tolerance

The therapist carefully helps the client stay within an emotionally manageable zone, not overwhelmed and not emotionally shut down.

Conditions That Might Be Treated

  • PTSD and complex trauma
  • Developmental trauma
  • Dissociation
  • Anxiety disorders
  • Attachment wounds
  • Chronic shame
  • Somatic symptoms
  • Emotional dysregulation

What a Session May Look Like

A therapist might ask:

  • “What do you notice in your body as you say that?”
  • “What happens in your chest right now?”
  • “What impulse does your body have?”
  • “Can you slowly experiment with that movement?”

Sessions are usually gentle, slow-paced, and focused on safety and regulation.

Related Approaches

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy might overlaps with:

  • Somatic Psychology
  • Somatic Experiencing
  • trauma research
  • Polyvagal Theory
  • Attachment-focused therapies
  • Mindfulness-based therapies

Criticisms and Limitations

Some clinicians might view somatic approaches as highly valuable for trauma treatment, especially when talk therapy alone is insufficient. Others note that research evidence is still developing compared to older cognitive-behavioral methods.

Shervan K Shahhian

Mindfulness Training is a way of learning to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings in the present moment:

Mindfulness training is a way of learning to pay attention to your thoughts, feelings, and surroundings in the present moment, without immediately judging or reacting to them. It could be widely used for stress reduction, emotional balance, and improving focus.

What mindfulness training involves

At its core, it’s about practicing awareness. Instead of getting caught up in worries about the future or replaying the past, you train your mind to stay with what’s happening right now.

Common elements include:

Focused attention (often on the breath)
Body awareness (noticing physical sensations)
Open monitoring (observing thoughts as they come and go)
Non-judgment (not labeling experiences as “good” or “bad”)
Popular mindfulness practices:

  1. Breathing meditation

Sit quietly and focus on your breath, how it feels going in and out. When your mind wanders (it will), gently bring it back.

  1. Body scan

Slowly move your attention through different parts of your body, noticing tension, warmth, or other sensations.

  1. Mindful walking

Pay attention to each step, your balance, and the feeling of your feet touching the ground.

  1. Everyday mindfulness

You can practice while eating, showering, or even washing dishes, just fully engage with the activity instead of doing it on autopilot.

Benefits backed by research

People who practice mindfulness regularly often report:

Lower stress and anxiety
Better concentration and memory
Improved emotional regulation
Better sleep
Reduced symptoms of depression
How to start (simple plan)

You don’t need anything fancy:

Start with 5 to 10 minutes a day
Use a timer
Sit comfortably, close your eyes (optional if safe), and focus on your breath
Expect distractions, it’s part of the training, not a failure
A realistic expectation

Mindfulness isn’t about “clearing your mind” or feeling calm all the time. It’s about becoming more aware of what’s happening inside you and responding more deliberately instead of reacting automatically.

Shervan K Shahhian

Salience Filtering is the mind’s way of deciding what matters right now and what can be ignored:

Salience filtering is the mind’s way of deciding what matters right now and what can be ignored.

At any given moment, your senses are flooded with far more information than you can consciously process, sounds, sights, thoughts, bodily sensations. Salience filtering is the mechanism that selects a small subset of that input and flags it as important (salient) so it enters awareness and guides behavior.

How it works

(CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)

It’s largely governed by the mind’s salience network, especially:

  • Anterior insula: (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)
  • Anterior cingulate cortex: (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)

This system continuously evaluates incoming stimuli based on:

  • Relevance to goals: (“Does this help me?”)
  • Emotional significance: (“Is this threatening or rewarding?”)
  • Novelty: (“Is this new or unexpected?”)

Only what passes this filter becomes the focus of attention.

Simple example

Imagine you’re at a loud party:

  • You ignore dozens of conversations (filtered out)
  • Suddenly, someone says your name across the room, it instantly grabs your attention

Your mind tagged that sound as salient, overriding everything else.

Why it matters

Salience filtering shapes:

  • Attention: (what you focus on)
  • Perception: (what you even notice exists)
  • Memory formation: (what gets stored)
  • Behavioral responses: (what you react to)

When it goes off balance

Distorted salience filtering is linked to several psychological states:

  • Anxiety: neutral stimuli feel threatening (over-tagging danger)
  • Depression: reduced salience of rewarding stimuli
  • Psychosis (schizophrenia): aberrant salience (random things feel deeply meaningful)

In your domain (psychology & mental training)

Salience filtering is tightly connected to:

  • Attentional control
  • Neural priming
  • Visualization / mental rehearsal

You may train it:

  • Focus repeatedly on certain cues, they become more salient
  • Use emotional intensity, increases tagging strength
  • Pair attention with intention, biases future perception

This maybe why practices like visualization or hypnotic suggestion can feel powerful, they reprogram what your mind flags as important.

One important reality check

It may feel like salience is revealing hidden truths or external signals, but neurologically: (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST), it’s a selection and weighting system, not a detection of objective importance in the environment. It tells you what your mind prioritizes, not necessarily what is inherently meaningful.

Shervan K Shahhian

Attention Shaping is the deliberate process of training:

Attention shaping is the deliberate process of training, guiding, or conditioning where and how your attention moves, so that over time, it becomes more efficient, stable, and aligned with your goals.

Think of it as sculpting the habits of your awareness, rather than just “trying to focus” in the moment.

What it really means

At a deeper level, attention shaping is about rewiring attentional patterns through repeated experience. Instead of reacting automatically to distractions, you gradually bias your mind toward certain stimuli, thoughts, or tasks.

It operates through principles from Cognitive

Psychology and Neuroscience like:

  • Reinforcement: what you repeatedly attend to becomes easier to attend to
  • Neuroplasticity: attention pathways strengthen with use: (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)
  • Salience filtering: your mind learns what matters and what to ignore

How attention shaping works

Attention shaping typically involves three mechanisms:

1. Selective reinforcement

You consistently bring attention back to a target (task, sensation, idea).
Over time, the mind learns: “this is important.”

Example:
Focusing on your breath in meditation strengthens the ability to return to it.

2. Reduction of competing stimuli

You minimize distractions so attention doesn’t scatter.

Example:
Turning off notifications trains your mind not to expect constant novelty.

3. Cue based guidance

You use cues or triggers to direct attention automatically.

Example:
A golfer focusing on a specific swing cue before each shot, this ties into your interest in performance psychology.

In practice (real world examples)

  • Meditation training: shaping sustained attention and awareness
  • Sports performance: directing attention to key cues (timing, posture, rhythm)
  • Therapy (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy): shifting attention away from rumination toward constructive thought patterns
  • Hypnosis / mental rehearsal: guiding attention inward and narrowing focus

Important distinction

Attention shaping is not just control, it’s conditioning.

  • Control: forcing attention in the moment
  • Shaping: making future attention naturally go where you want

This is why it’s more powerful:

it reduces effort over time.

A deeper psychological insight

Attention shaping gradually builds what you’ve been exploring as:

  • Attentional sovereignty: you decide what gets your awareness
  • Automaticity: attention flows without conscious effort
  • Perceptual biasing: your mind starts seeing what it’s trained to notice

Simple formula

You can think of attention shaping like this:

Repeated focus, reduced distraction, meaningful cues:

trained attention system

Shervan K Shahhian

The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is a contemporary therapeutic approach:

The NeuroAffective Relational Model (NARM) is a contemporary therapeutic approach designed to treat developmental trauma, the kind that arises from chronic early-life experiences like neglect, misattunement, or inconsistent caregiving, rather than single shocking events.

Core Idea (in plain terms)

NARM looks at how early relational experiences shape:

  • your identity
  • your emotional regulation
  • your sense of connection to self and others

Instead of asking “What happened to you?” it also asks:

“How did you adapt to survive, and how are those adaptations affecting you now?”

The 5 Developmental Survival Styles

NARM proposes that people develop patterns to cope with unmet needs in childhood:

  1. Connection: Difficulty feeling belonging or connection
  2. Attunement: Disconnection from one’s own needs
  3. Trust: Issues with reliance and safety in relationships
  4. Autonomy: Trouble asserting oneself or setting boundaries
  5. Love/Sexuality: Conflicts around intimacy and self-worth

These aren’t “pathologies”, they’re intelligent adaptations that once helped you survive.

How NARM Works in Therapy

Unlike traditional trauma models that focus heavily on past events, NARM emphasizes:

1. Present Moment Awareness

  • Focus on what is happening right now in your body and emotions
  • Tracks patterns as they arise in real time

2. Identity Level Healing

  • Works with core beliefs like:
    • “I’m not enough”
    • “I don’t matter”
  • These are seen as adaptations, not truths

3. Relational Healing

  • The therapist-client relationship becomes a corrective emotional experience
  • Emphasis on authenticity and mutual presence

4. Bottom Up, Top Down Integration

  • Combines body awareness (bottom-up) with cognitive insight (top-down)

What Makes NARM Different

Compared to something like Cognitive Behavioral Therapy or classic Psychoanalysis:

  • It doesn’t pathologize symptoms
  • It avoids over-identifying with trauma narratives
  • It focuses on agency, not just wounds
  • It works directly with shame and identity, not just behavior

Example

Someone who grew up feeling unseen might:

  • Adapt by becoming hyper independent
  • Develop a belief: “I don’t need anyone”

NARM would gently explore:

  • The cost of that adaptation today
  • The longing underneath it
  • The possibility of reconnecting safely

Why It’s Gaining Attention

NARM aligns with modern understandings of:

  • Attachment Theory
  • Neuroscience
  • The role of implicit memory and regulation

It’s especially useful for:

  • Chronic relationship patterns
  • Identity issues
  • Complex trauma (often called C-PTSD)

A grounded note

NARM is a legitimate, clinically used model, but like all therapies:

  • It’s not a universal solution
  • Effectiveness depends on the therapist and the client fit
  • Shervan K Shahhian

Controlled Attentional Training, explained:

Controlled attentional training could be a structured way of deliberately directing, stabilizing, and shifting your attention instead of letting it be pulled around automatically by thoughts, emotions, or external stimuli.

At its core, it treats attention like a trainable system, similar to a muscle, rather than something fixed.

What it actually means

You’re practicing three core abilities:

1. Sustained attention
Holding focus on one target (breath, task, image) without drifting.

2. Attentional shifting
Moving your focus intentionally from one thing to another.

3. Attentional inhibition
Ignoring distractions, both internal (thoughts, anxiety) and external (noise, interruptions).

Why it matters (psychologically)

Controlled attentional training directly affects:

  • Anxiety regulation: (reduces rumination loops)
  • Performance under pressure: (keeps cognition task-focused)
  • Cognitive flexibility: (ability to switch perspectives)
  • Automaticity: (lets trained skills run without interference)

It could be used in approaches like:

  • Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
  • Attention Training Technique (from metacognitive therapy)

What it looks like in practice

Here are a few classic training methods:

1. Focus anchoring

Pick a single anchor (breath, sound, visual point).

  • Hold attention on it
  • When distraction happens, gently return

This builds control, not suppression.

2. Structured attention shifting

You deliberately move attention in a pattern:

  • Sound, body sensation, visual object, thought, back to sound

This trains flexibility instead of fixation.

3. Open monitoring

Instead of focusing narrowly:

  • Observe whatever arises (thoughts, feelings, sensations)
  • Don’t engage, just notice and release

This weakens attentional capture by intrusive thoughts.

4. Task-embedded training

You apply control during real activities:

  • Reading without re-scanning
  • Staying present in conversation
  • Performing under pressure (sports, speaking)

This is where it becomes functional, not just meditative.

A simple 5 minute protocol

Try this:

  1. Focus on your breath for 1 minute
  2. Shift to sounds for 1 minute
  3. Shift to body sensations for 1 minute
  4. Open awareness (anything that arises) for 1 minute
  5. Return to breath for 1 minute

The key is not perfection, it’s regaining control each time attention drifts.

A useful way to think about it

Untrained attention is:

reactive, sticky, and easily hijacked

Trained attention becomes:

intentional, flexible, and stable

Shervan K Shahhian

Anxiety Reduction Techniques:

Anxiety reduction may not be just one single technique, it could be a combination of how you regulate your body, attention, and interpretation of events. Since anxiety maybe both physiological and cognitive, effective reduction works on multiple levels at once.

Here’s a, grounded breakdown:

1. Regulate the Body First (fastest impact)

Anxiety may begin in the nervous system, before thoughts fully form, (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)

  • Slow breathing (4–6 breaths/minute) activates the parasympathetic response
  • Muscle relaxation reduces physical tension loops
  • Movement (walking, light exercise) burns off stress hormones

This may directly reduce symptoms associated with Anxiety.

2. Stabilize Attention

Anxiety may thrive on scattered or future-focused attention.

  • Bring focus to sensory input (what you see, hear, feel)
  • Use attentional anchoring (breath, body, or a simple task)
  • Limit mental “time travel” into imagined outcomes

This counters what’s often called attentional hijacking.

3. Change the Thought Loop (Cognitive Layer)

Anxiety may often be driven by distorted predictions.

Core distortions:

  • Catastrophizing (“This will go badly”)
  • Overgeneralizing (“It always happens”)
  • Mind-reading (“They think I’m failing”)

Techniques:

  • Cognitive reframing: Replace “What if this goes wrong?”, “What’s most likely?”
  • Probability correction: Estimate realistic odds
  • Cognitive diffusion (from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy): see thoughts as events, not facts

4. Behavioral Exposure (long-term reduction)

Avoidance keeps anxiety alive.

  • Gradually face the feared situation
  • Stay long enough for anxiety to decrease naturally
  • Repeat until the brain relearns safety

This maybe one of the most evidence-based methods in Cognitive Behavioral Therapy.

5. Train Automatic Calm Responses

You may condition calm the same way anxiety gets conditioned.

  • Pair relaxation and trigger imagery
  • Use mental rehearsal of calm performance
  • Build automaticity so calm becomes default under pressure

6. Reduce Baseline Vulnerability

Anxiety could be much easier to trigger when your baseline is off.

  • Sleep quality
  • Caffeine/stimulant intake
  • Chronic stress load
  • Social isolation

These don’t cause all anxiety, but they lower your threshold.

7. Optional Advanced Layer

You might appreciate this angle:

  • Anxiety can be seen as misdirected predictive processing
  • The mind is constantly simulating future states
  • Reduction: improving prediction accuracy, control over attention

Practices like:

  • Visualization (correctly used)
  • Self-hypnosis
  • Controlled attentional training

…can reshape those predictive loops.

Simple Practical Protocol (2–5 minutes)

If you want something immediate:

Slow breath (inhale 4, exhale 6) for ~2 minutes

Name 5 things you can perceive (grounding)

    Relax shoulders/jaw consciously

    Shervan K Shahhian

    Visualization is the mental process:

    Visualization is the mental process of creating or recreating experiences in your mind using imagination, essentially “seeing” without your eyes, but it can also involve other senses.

    At a deeper level, could be tied to how the mind simulates reality. When you vividly imagine an action or scenario, many of the same neural pathways activate as if you were actually doing it. This is why visualization is widely used in performance psychology, therapy, and skill training.

    What Visualization Actually Involves

    It may not be just “seeing images.” Strong visualization typically includes:

    • Visual imagery: pictures, scenes, colors, movement
    • Kinesthetic imagery: body sensations (muscle tension, balance, motion)
    • Auditory imagery: sounds, voices, environment
    • Emotional tone: how the situation feels internally

    The more senses involved, the more effective it maybe to be.

    How It Works (Psychologically & Neurologically)

    Visualization may work through a few key mechanisms:

    • Neural simulation: The mind doesn’t fully distinguish between vividly imagined and real experiences
    • Priming: It prepares your nervous system for a specific outcome or behavior, (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)
    • Attention shaping: It directs what you notice and how you respond in real situations
    • Memory encoding: It builds “reference experiences” even before they happen

    This maybe closely related to concepts like mental rehearsal and neural priming, which you’ve been exploring.

    Types of Visualization

    1. Outcome Visualization
      • Imagining the end result (success, winning, confidence)
    2. Process Visualization(more powerful for performance)
      • Mentally rehearsing each step of an action (golf swing, public speaking flow)
    3. Coping Visualization
      • Imagining challenges and successfully handling them

    A Simple Example

    If someone is preparing for a presentation:

    • They imagine walking onto the stage
    • Feel their posture steady
    • Hear their voice coming out clearly
    • See the audience engaged
    • Experience calm focus instead of anxiety

    That mental run-through conditions their mind and body to respond that way in reality.

    Important Reality Check

    Visualization may not be magic or manifestation in the mystical sense. It doesn’t change external reality by itself. What it may do is:

    • Change internal state
    • Improve performance readiness
    • Increase behavioral consistency

    The outcome may improve because your actions become more aligned and efficient, not because reality bends to thought.

    Where It’s Used

    • Sports psychology (elite athletes use it extensively)
    • Clinical psychology (anxiety reduction, exposure therapy)
    • Skill acquisition (motor learning, speaking, performance)
    • High-performance training (military, aviation, even surgery)
    • Shervan K Shahhian

    Cognitive Freezing is a mental state where your thinking temporarily “locks up”:

    Cognitive freezing is a mental state where your thinking temporarily “locks up” under pressure, stress, or overload. Instead of processing information fluidly, your mind becomes rigid, blank, or stuck, making it hard to decide, respond, or even recall what you know.

    It’s essentially the cognitive version of the fight, flight, freeze response, a well-known survival mechanism in psychology.

    What’s happening in the mind

    Cognitive freezing could be closely tied to the fight or flight response. When a situation feels threatening (physically or psychologically):

    • The amygdala detects danger and activates stress signals (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)
    • Stress hormones like cortisol surge (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)
    • The prefrontal cortex (responsible for reasoning and decision-making) becomes less active (CONSULT WITH A NEUROLOGIST)

    Result: thinking narrows or shuts down entirely

    How it feels

    People experiencing cognitive freezing may often report:

    • goes blank (“I knew this, but now I can’t think”)
    • Inability to make even simple decisions
    • Slowed reaction time
    • Feeling mentally paralyzed or stuck
    • Reduced verbal fluency (words don’t come out)

    Common triggers

    • Performance pressure (public speaking, exams, sports)
    • Social evaluation or fear of judgment
    • Sudden unexpected situations
    • High cognitive load (too much information at once)
    • Anxiety or trauma-related cues

    Why it exists

    From an evolutionary perspective, freezing maybe adaptive:

    • It can prevent impulsive mistakes
    • It allows rapid threat assessment
    • In extreme danger, “playing dead” can be protective

    But in modern settings (like presentations or tests), it becomes maladaptive.

    How to reduce cognitive freezing

    1. Pre-load the mind (mental rehearsal)
    Repeated simulation reduces uncertainty, so the mind doesn’t interpret the situation as a threat.

    2. Down-regulate stress quickly

    • Slow breathing (4–6 seconds inhale/exhale)
    • Grounding attention in physical sensations

    3. Use cognitive “anchors”

    • Simple pre-planned cues like: “Just start with the first sentence”
    • Break tasks into automatic chunks

    4. Train automaticity
    The more a skill is automatic, the less it relies on the prefrontal cortex under stress.

    5. Reframe the threat
    Shift interpretation from danger, challenge, which reduces amygdala overactivation.

    A useful way to think about it

    Cognitive freezing isn’t a lack of ability, it could be a temporary access problem.
    The knowledge is still there, but stress blocks retrieval.

    Shervan K Shahhian