During a job interview, you’re so nervous that it’s hard to think. And afterwards, when someone asks you how it goes, you actually can’t remember. You might feel that you’re losing your memory, but according to Dr Ira Fischler, this “blackout” is probably not a loss of memory at all. It’s more likely that you didn’t even have the memory in the first place.

Fischler is a professor of psychology at the University of Florida. “When memories of specific emotional events appear to be lost, it’s most often because our attention during the event is not on the interaction itself,” he told Global News. Instead, it’s common for a person to be engrossed in how they present themselves or their inner emotional state during the interaction—especially at the stressful moments. This would explain why some people struggle to recall the questions asked during a job interview, for example. They are instead concentrating their attention on how they’re presenting themselves to the employers at that moment.

When we’re in a situation that causes nervousness or anxiety, a “fight or flight” reaction is caused, which sends certain hormones (荷尔蒙) out into the body. “It can cause several side effects, like feeling light-headed and dizzy and affect the way our brain remembers situations that we’ve been in,” said psychologist Laura Bloom. She thinks of the hippocampus (海马结构), a part of the brain responsible for memory, as the brain’s library and each memory as a card with all the information about what happened on it.

“When something stressful happens, the experience of trauma (精神创伤) causes our brain not necessarily to keep all of the details properly,” she said “Therefore, it will be extremely important and beneficial for you to replace the ‘fight or flight’ response with calmer and more peaceful approaches.”

Do you belong to a highly emotionally intelligent person?

As we all know, emotional intelligence(EI) has been an important factor in our success and happiness, not only at work, but in our relationships and all areas of our lives. So what sets emotionally intelligent people apart?【小题1】.

They focus on the positive. While not ignoring the bad news, emotionally intelligent people do not spend a lot of time and energy focusing on problems. 【小题2】 These people focus on what they are able to do and what is within their control.

They surround themselves with positive people. People with a lot of EI don't spend a lot of time listening to complainers. They are aware that those people are not helpful to them. 【小题3】 You can spot these folks as they tend to smile and laugh a great deal and attract other positive people. Their warmth, openness, and caring attitude let others look upon them as more trustworthy.

They look for ways to make life more fun, happy, and interesting. Whether it is in their workplace, at home, or with friends, high EI people know what makes them happy and look for opportunities to expand their enjoyment. 【小题4】 Therefore, they do whatever they can to brighten someone else's day.

【小题5】 People with high EI are so busy thinking of possibilities in the future that they don't spend a lot of time worrying about things that didn't work out in the past. They take the learning from their past failures and apply it to their actions in the future.

Ants live in complex colonies (群落), sometimes called nests. They need to defend their colony, seek food and take care of little ones. Successfully performing all these complex tasks requires reliable communication among nestmates. Recent work shows how their societies depend on the exchange of reliable information.

Human communication depends mainly on the sound of their voice, their appearance or their clothes. Ants, however, rely primarily on their sharp sense of smell.

An outer shell covers an ant’s body, which carries a unique smell that varies from individual to individual and gives each ant a unique smell feature that other ants can recognize. This smell feature can communicate important information.

For ants and other insects, receiving chemical information begins when a smell enters the small hairs located along their antennae (触角). These hairs contain special receptors, called chemosensory neurons (感化性神经元), which sort and send the chemical information to the ant’s brain. Smells, such as those given off from an ant’s oily coat, act like chemical “keys”. Ants can smell these “keys” only if they’re placed into the correct set of chemosensory neuron “locks”. A neuronal lock remains shut to any smells except its particular key. The ant’s brain can obtain this sensory information to make decisions that lead to cooperation between nestmates or battles between non-nestmates.

To better understand how ants recognize and communicate information, researchers used laboratory tools to affect their sense of smell. They were interested in what happens when an ant’s sense of smell goes wrong.

When they messed with ants’ sense of smell — shutting down or flooding their smell receptors — they found that ants exercised self-control and chose to accept rather than attack their fellow ants. When the ants lost their sense of smell, and their ability to recognize accurate information became weak, they no longer stuck together in a united colony.

The researchers discovered that if the means of communication is interrupted, it spells doom for their colony. Ant societies break down and the colony quickly dies.