The coronavirus pandemic has negatively affected our brains by stress factors. What I learned from reading the article, I learned that stressing messes with our brain that we can’t think clearly.  The pandemic caused us to stress over our health, economic and social lives. I also learned about the prefrontal cortex, the front section of the brain that has its “executive functions” that interfere with our thinking habits and task performance. The “executive functions” are abstract thinking, concentrating, planning, and gathering multiple information. it even helps us with our self-control such as patience. The prefrontal cortex is impaired by mild stress.

The author, Laura Sanders uses the human brain study as research in her article to explain the effects of your brain due to stress and demonstrate what happens in your brain when stressing. And an experiment is used as research to demonstrate how people have been pulled away from their planning caused by stress.  Researchers wanted to find out what were the effects of stress? In the experiment, participants were asked to learn familiar routes, locations, objects in virtual towns. During the experiment, “moderately painful” electric zaps were used to increase stress on participants. They had eight seconds to plan how they were going to get to the target object. Researchers found out that those who were stressed took a shortcut about “31 percent of the time” when they were stressed over the electric shock despite that they were less prepared to take the shortcut. Also that they were able to reach the target object by making a circular turn. The unstressed participants took “47 percent of time” to take the shortcut.  The unstressed participants had a plan and that may be the reason it took at this percent of the time.

Sanders uses her personal experience to share about her coronavirus stress experience with for example dealing with home life with a first grader child, being heartbroken by the covid deaths and deciding if she’s going to take care of the kid screaming upstairs or let her husband do it. Her personal experience demonstrates how stress affected her and her brain’s thinking during the pandemic.  She starts off her article with her personal experience as an introduction to the article. Her personal experience on her coronavirus stress gives her readers an idea of what the article might be about.