Sorry, but a negative reinforcement cycle of tensing up in a medium stress situation is exactly the kind of characteristic that I'm trying to screen out in an interview.

Stressful situations happen a lot more than never in the real world (and sometimes they even involve talking to people, like customers) -- I don't want to have coworkers who can't handle that.

I think that there are other problems here though; if you are going to be a part of an environment where you may experience adrenaline surges, you need to work through them. Skipping that part of an interview means that you won't be able to evaluate that response. One solution may be to include a high-stress part of the interview, but to weight it in the overall evaluation appropriately.

[>>>This is great when you've got to climb a tree to get away from a tiger. This is horrible if you are trying to demonstrate your ability to function mentally.

Climbing a tree won't get you away from a tiger; it's a cat.]

Well, jobs are high stress affairs too. We often have to maintain production systems that fail in cryptic ways at the most inconvenient times. I postulate that such situations are more stressful than solving some binary search tree problem on a whiteboard.

I deal with that kind of anxiety feedback loop in interviews, especially when I feel like I have no other edge besides my interview performance and resume, i.e., no personal connection. At my current job, they gave me the questions on paper and left me alone to answer them. I did well with that. (I also had a personal connection.) Later, I did a phone interview with Google based on having come up on one of their LinkedIn scans, and it went terrible.

How a person does on a pressure interview certainly tells you something, but it would seem to put a high priority on a particular skill at the expense of others. It probably effectively screens out anxious types. I'm not sure you can generalize what you learn too broadly, though.

I've been meaning to read this http://www.amazon.com/Choke-Secrets-Brain-Reveal-Getting/dp/... hopefully got get some insight into my own "freezing up"

It's not just a born talent thing. Practicing interviewing and solving problems on a board in front of someone can do a lot to help you get over that anxiety. Yet most people never bother to practice and then wonder why they are bad at it.