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Showing posts from June, 2014

Health Benefits of Resveratrol: New Plaudits

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Joe: My doctor told me to give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods. Sam: What will you do? Joe: I think I’ll give up my doctor. I try not to get too excited about memory benefits of supplements, because too often the claims are not substantiated by studies that are well controlled and peer reviewed. I now think resveratrol may be one of the few supplements that benefits brain function. When I wrote my first blog on research on resveratrol benefits for brain function and memory, there were over 2,000 scientific papers. [1] Don't worry; I am only going to tell you about a few studies. Resveratrol is an active ingredient in red wine. This compound has been credited for explaining why red-wine drinkers in France, who drink more wine than most people, are healthier than would be predicted by their lifestyle of little exercise and eating lots of cheese. The problem is most studies suggest you would have to drink a 100 or more glasses of red wine a day to get much resveratrol effect (a...

Memory Athlete Gimmicks. TIP 2: Composite Flash Card

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Teaching, learning, and remembering don’t have to be complicated. In my previous Memory Athlete" Tip #1, I described a strategy based on linking mental images to particular locations in a familiar environment, such as one's home or yard. Here, Tip 2 describes my invention of a simple flash-card process that can help accomplish all three educational processes in a computer slide-show file consisting of only one slide. This one-screen file can serve as a single composite “flash-card” reservoir of information from which information can be organized and modified, saved for on- or off-line study, and always available for self-testing (in principle, as is done with conventional flash cards). Conventional flash cards are typically limited to factoids, with a word on one side and definition on the other. But composite flash cards are fundamentally different because they provide a way to capture and learn whole cohesively organized concepts as well as factoids. Moreover, the new type o...