clair073

Got kids or grandkids in school? Are you in school or college? This blog is for you. I don’t have to tell you that school is stressful, what with hard courses, tough teachers, and high-stakes tests. The stress is understandable, but also counterproductive. Anxiety and other negative emotions interfere with learning, remembering, and test taking. So why don’t schools put more emphasis on helping students cope? Good teachers do help students cope by making their explanations as simple and clear as possible. But unless they lower their standards, which benefits nobody, school will still be stressful. Research has shown some things that teachers and students could do to reduce stress and improve academic performance. The most obvious is to understand the principles for efficient and effective learning, as I have tried to outline in my latest book, The Learning Skills Cycle. My two other books focus specifically on improving memorization skills. The American Psychological Associations 2013...

Many scientists, even physical scientists, assert that the Holy Grail of science is to understand human  consciousness. This human state is even hard to define, but is characterized by a state in which we know what we believe, know, and imagine, know what we decide and plan, and feel what we feel. That explains nothing. The problem in understanding is not only that the mechanisms must surely be complicated, but also that we don’t have good non-invasive experimental tools. There are only two useful tools, a metabolic proxy of neural electrical activity (functional fMRI) and scalp monitoring of electrical activity (the electroencephalogram {EEG), or its magnetic field counterpart. Among the problems with fMRI are that it is only an indirect measure of the actual signaling within the brain that generates thought and feeling and enables consciousness. Its time resolution is about one-second or more, whereas signaling in the brain occurs on a millisecond scale. Although the EEG monitors...