Procedural memory is memory storage of skills and procedures. This type of memory has also been referred to as ‘tacit knowledge’ or ‘implicit knowledge’. Procedural memory is involved in tasks such as remembering how to swim or how to ride a bicycle. This is ‘knowhow’ memory; it often can only be expressed by performing the specific skill and people have problems verbalizing what they are doing and why. Procedural memory is, therefore, very important in human motor performance.
Category: Stress Relief
Stress Relief: What is Declarative Memory?
Declarative memory is our memory for facts. There is a common belief that declarative memory is further broken down into two components: Episodic (memory for past and personally experienced events), and Semantic (knowledge for the meaning of words and how to apply them).
Stress Relief: How Do We Feel Pain?
To understand stress-induced analgesia, it is necessary for us to understand how the body perceives pain and how it responds to the pain signal. Here, we confront an anatomical problem. The sensors for pain are scattered all over the body. The central nervous system (CNS) processes the signals from the sensors. This is housed entirely within the cranial cavity housing the brain, and the vertebral canal, housing the spinal cord.
Stress Relief: Stress Reduces Pain
In the last few months of 2003, newspapers in India had been running full-page advertisements from an oil company. The advertisements described the life story and achievements of individuals who succeeded against all odds and inspired others. One life story struck me as particularly poignant. It is the story of a brave captain in the Indian Army. Barely a year and a half out of the Indian Military Academy in Dehra Dun, the young captain and his team is asked to defend the country against terrorists in the inhospitable terrain of Kargil in the Himalayas.
Stress Relief: Alzheimer’s Disease and Stress
People who get more upset by disturbing events are more likely to suffer the declines in memory and mental ability found in Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study published recently. The study tracked a group of priests, nuns and monks as part of a long-term examination of the aging process.
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Stress Relief: Acupuncture
An interesting facet of this discussion on the body’s opiates and the ability of the brain to modulate pain is that it begins to explain how acupuncture may work. Practised for centuries in China, acupuncture involves using fine needles that are stuck into patients at different points. With the needles in the body, pain is reduced to such an extent that surgery can be performed without anaesthesia.
Stress Relief: Neurochemistry of Stress-induced Analgesia
With this background, we can understand the story of the neurochemistry of stress-induced analgesia that began in the early 1970s. It was a time of the hippie culture in America and the rest of the world. The young men and women in the West had then discovered the joys of opiates and the pleasures to be derived from them. Naturally, the leading-edge scientists of that time wanted to know how the various drugs like heroin, morphine, and opium worked.
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Stress Relief: Aging and Stress
Typically, we look at some important system in the body and examine the effects of stress or stress response. In this section, we are going to take a look at the big picture and deal with the whole body but from the point of view of examining the effects of stress on the aging process. Two obvious questions arise:
Stress Relief: Can Stress Accelerate Aging?
Intuitively, we all recognize that there is a connection between how we live and how we die. It then makes sense that if we are stressed during our youth, it will have an impact on how we age and how fast that takes place. At the beginning of the 20th century, Rubner, a German physiologist came up with the idea of living beings having a fixed time for which a body can go on. His main hypothesis was that an organism could carry on an activity for a specific number of times and, after that time; wear and tear would cause it to fail. For example, the heart can beat only so many times before it will fail.
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Stress Relief: Managing Stress by the Aged
One of the questions we posited at the start of this chapter was the ability of older individuals to deal with stress. The short answer is that they deal poorly with stress and the long answer is the rest of this section. The inability of older individuals to deal effectively with stress fits in with our intuition and observation of aged persons as vulnerable and fragile. To put it in perspective, almost all the systems of the body of older people work as they do for young people. But bring in a stressor1 and the aged organism is likely to fail. Consider the scenario of an individual stressed by a sudden drop in temperature.