clair073

School is ending for the year, and students surely welcome the break. But they will do well to think on how they learn to learn so that next Fall they can be more successful with less effort. Interesting how that reminds me of my e-book for students, Better Grades, Less Effort. In my experience with students, both the college students I teach and the secondary students that teachers tell me about, the biggest weakness students have is that they either try to remember school material by rote memorization or have no strategy at all, relying on some kind of magical mental osmosis.  Even among students who rely on rote memory, they generally lack much of a strategy for memorizing, relying on varying degrees of casual “looking over” the instructional material until they think they can remember it. Experiments show that students routinely over-estimate how much they remember and under-estimate the value of further study. Moreover, many educators at all levels have disdain for memorizatio...

As each of us goes through life, we remember a little and forget a lot. The stockpile of what we remember contributes greatly to define us and our place in the world. Thus, it is important to remember and optimize the processes that make that possible. People who compete in memory contests (“memory athletes”) have long known the value of associational cues (see my Memory Power 101 book). Neuroscientists have known for a long time about memory consolidation (converting short-term memory to long-term form) and the value of associational cues. But now, important new understanding is arising from a research lab at Northwestern that links cueing to “re-consolidation” and reveals new possibilities for optimizing long-term memory formation. The underlying research approach is based on such well-established memory principles as: When information is first acquired, it is tagged for its potential importance or value. Such tagging is influenced by multiple factors such as repetition, attention, ...

Physical exercise can rehabilitate bodies that have grown soft and flabby. Can mental exercise rehabilitate brains that have deteriorated because of disease or age? Maybe. A published scholarly review has examined the research literature on this issue and arrived at several useful conclusions: 1.       Focus, Reduce Distractions. The two common causes of forgetting, in both normal people and those with impaired memory, are a) failure to register new information effectively, and b) interference from conflicting sensations and thoughts. 2.       Customize the Rehabilitation Needed. Rehab need to take into account the type of memory therapy and the cause and severity of the impaired memory capability. 3.       Learn in Small, Frequently Repeated Chunks. New information has to be re-packaged for memory-impaired people so that it is in simple, concrete form, in small chunks, and repeated frequently — with patients r...