Not quite true, Dinger,
actually, when in real stress, we focus on saving our lives.
We do that by switching off, or rather reducing, some of the higher level brain functions which take a lot of time and creativity to perform. One of the things that will fade very quickly is what is called "declarative memory". You know you use it all the time. It's got quite fuzzy borders on both ends. Can you think of the name of your second girl friend's brother (if she had one)? I guess you'll be able to after mulling over that for a few minutes. Can you tell me what three or four requirements have to be met before the ground spoilers deploy on an A320? If you had been unable before this thread, you sure can by now. But if you're not flying the plane, you'll forget it. That is, you'll forget how to remember it. Remembering things from the declarative memory is a rather creative act. You have to think of things that connect to the thing you want to come up with.
Maybe the best explanation is what you do when you've mislaid your keychain somewhere in the house. It's not in one of it's three usual places, so what do you do? If you're any way like me, you'll try to remember what you've done, where you've been since you unlocked the door. That will help. Declarative memory.
And you also know that you get less and less good at this when you get under stress.
However, if you know how to ride a bicycle, I'm pretty sure than even a rather high level of stress won't make you fall off your bike. That was different when you were a child. Has it ever happened to you back than that someone hollered your name and you looked around and - fell on your nose?
Riding a bike is one of those things that slowly trasitions into procedural memory.
In aviation, memory items are design to reside exactly here, in procedural memory. Repetition makes memories go there over time.
Procedural memory is very fast to access, it's usually very simple stimulus-action type of memory.
In stress, we're very good to access procedural memory. It's where everything is stored that we needed to get away from a predator at the dawn of humanity, probably even earlier than that.
We are very bad at accessing our declarative memory, though.
pj