NAEMSE MAGAZINE, 2003 – Teaching basic emergency medical skills requires a delicate balance between “teaching for the test” and “teaching for the real world”. Every EMS instructor struggles with how to prepare a student for the pressure of a real medical emergency. For we know that all too often, students who appear to know what they are doing during practice sessions “go blank” when dealing with a mock patient during a test. We know that stress is truly the mind killer. So it should come as no surprise that scientists at the University of California at Irvine have demonstrated that stress kills memory.