Within five minutes of casual conversation with our favorite geniuses—Barbara Kingsolver, Leonardo da Vinci, Meryl Streep, and Benjamin Franklin come to mind—we would all be likely to agree we’re talking with people of startling intelligence. Recognizing people of startling intelligence is a common and simple feat of intuition.

However, if we each had to choose a measure of intelligence to support our intuitions and to verify just how intelligent these geniuses are and in what ways, the complexities would quickly overwhelm us. And we’ve only been trying to figure out how to measure intelligence for about a hundred years. Just a few decades ago we started learning about EQ (emotional intelligence) and that it might be as important as IQ. As a concept, intelligence is both simple and still bafflingly complex.

Like intelligence, stress is both simple and complex. We often know stress when we feel it, yet we fumble when we try to measure it. And we’ve only been studying how to measure stress in humans for about fifty years. Relative to cognitive neuroscience, stress neuroscience is still in its adolescence.

Part of what has slowed stress neuroscience down has been some sloppy terminology. The word has been overworked as a noun, verb, and adjective. Is stress a demanding event or the response to that event? Is it the person’s subjective appraisal that determines the severity of the stress response, or some more objective physiologic measure, such as heart rate or heart rate recovery? Or some........

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