clair073

One common definition of "free will" is that a person can decide or choose among multiple alternatives without being forced by physical laws, luck, fate, or divine will. Most of us feel we are in charge of our choices when no outside force requires us to make a particular choice. But it is fashionable these days for scholars to insist that free will is an illusion, a trick the brain plays on us. I will spare you the philosophical knots of specious assumptions and convoluted logic that that scholars tie themselves into. Why do I bring this up? What has the "free will" issue have to do with learning and memory? Everything. Rather than memory dictating our choices, either we have chosen what to learn and remember or we can veto or amend the influence in our decision-making. Human brains make choices consciously and unconsciously by real-time evaluation of alternatives in terms of previous learning from other situations and their anticipated usefulness. This learning oc...

Have you noticed that so many elderly people seem frail, walk slowly, and seem to lack energy? If this applies to you, noticing it is unavoidable. These problems are preventable. For 25 years, I jogged at least a mile and a half three times a week. This was crucial for helping me stop smoking. I don’t know why, except that I could not smoke and jog at the same time. Also, the 15-30 minute recovery time reminded me just how bad the smoking had been for my health. Why did I quit jogging? The jogging messed up my joints. So, I took up swimming, but since I sink like a lead mannequin, that is just too much work. So now, I joined a gym, where I use the elliptical, treadmill, and muscle-building machines. This environment helps because I have companions in my discomfort, and occasionally I get the satisfaction of comparing myself to the few “90-pound weaklings” that show up. We have known for many years that exercise is good for you, especially as you get older. Known benefits of exercise in...

“Too much of a good thing” and “it’s all relative” now take on new meaning. A new research report of seven studies suggests an explanation for the paradox that humans misjudge the extent of a changing situation. This report, published in the June 29 th issue of the premier journal, Science , demonstrated that people often respond to diminished prevalence of a stimulus by expanding their perception of its prevalence. For example, when looking at a matrix panel of blue and purple dots, if the experimenter reduces the percentage of blue dots, the subjects began to see purple dots as blue. Or when shown panels of threatening faces mixed with neutral faces in which the percentage of angry faces became rarer, they began to see neutral faces as threatening. Or when unethical requests of the subjects were made rarer, subjects began to regard innocuous requests as unethical. In other words, reduced prevalence of a certain stimulus created a bias for finding more of that stimulus than actually ...

In an earlier post, “Where Neuroscience Stands in Understanding Consciousness,” I presented a summary of the progress occurring in neuroscientific understanding of consciousness ( https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/memory-medic/201804/where-neuroscience-stands-in-understanding-consciousness ). Now a recent report in the May issue of Science adds to a growing understanding of how the brain generates conscious recognition. The study examined neural impulse discharge responses of monkey brain to visual stimuli. Electrodes were implanted in the four visual cortex areas that are sequentially activated by visual stimuli. The stimulus was a circular spot of varying contrast in the lower left area of the visual field. Monkeys were cued when a stimulus was delivered, though whether they saw it or not varied with the spot’s contrast against the visual background. Monkeys were trained to report when they knew they saw the spot by shifting   their gaze from a central fixation point to th...

The Joys of Consciousness You take time to be alone, valuing your personal time. You meditate. You feel light and buoyant. You feel spiritually uplifted. You find a solution to a problem. You have a fresh new idea. You notice something beautiful. You walk outside in nature and feel refreshed. You engage in physical activity that's invigorating. You are playful and take time to play. There is a moment of pure joy. You smile in appreciation. You respect someone else's boundaries without being asked. You lift someone else's spirits. You make another person laugh. You give someone a helping hand. You do something kind. You forgive a slight. You offer yourself in service to someone in need. You feel a close bond with another person. You cherish another person. ― from The Healing Self by Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi        re-sequenced to show the joys of nurturing oneself and then nurturing others.

Common wisdom asserts that your IQ is fixed. Of course, the various “multiple intelligences” change with personal life experiences and growth, but we usually consider the standard IQ score to be inherent and unchangeable. But even the standard IQ measure changes during different life stages. Clearly, the IQ of young children changes as they mature. Several studies even show that working-memory training can raise the IQ of elementary-school children. More than one analyst claims that a rigorous PhD program can raise IQ in adults. Most obvious is the decline of IQ in those elderly who do not age well because of disease. A neglected segment along the age spectrum is the teenage years. Now, evidence indicates that this age group experiences IQ changes ranging from a decline to an increase. A study of this issue shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ scores in teenagers relate closely to the developmental changes that occur in brain structure during the teenage years. Longitudinal brain-i...

The hardest memory task I ever had was to give an 18-minute TED talk from memory. I remember struggling with remembering my core ideas and their sequence. To solve this problem, my first task was to create some slides, which the TED format allows. The directors even show the slides on a monitor at the foot of the stage that only the speaker can see. Looking at each slide as it advanced helped provide cues in the proper order, but to be effective, slides must not have much text, and in no case can a given slide reveal on its own the associated content. I still had a memorization problem. Then I remembered the “production effect,” which basically is a way to strengthen memory by actually forcing the recall in the appropriate setting. In other words, I needed to rehearse by actually giving the speech, vocalizations, mannerisms, and all, in front of a mirror. The usual thing we think of about improving memory is the need for rehearsal, especially the kind of rehearsal where you force recal...

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...

On several occasions, I have written about the anti-aging beneficial effects of exercise. New studies, confirm earlier findings of exercise benefit. Now, a new study shows that exercise reduces levels of the major inflammatory chemical, interleukin-6, and an associated enhancement of neural activity in the brain circuitry used to encode information and form memories. In response to earlier studies by others showing that exercise improves mental function, a team from mostly German universities studied the effects of exercise on 32 subjects aged 52 to 71 years old. They were particularly interested in memory because prior studies by others made it clear that age usually impairs memories of names and faces, situations and events, which are categorized as episodic memory. Tests of recall of episodic memory show marked age decrements in many subjects, even if they are given reminder cues. Other researchers had shown that exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, reduces decline of episodic m...

On multiple occasions, readers of my learning and memory blog posts asked me what they could do to improve their working memory. This is an important and very practical question. Working memory affects all aspects of life success: personal, educational, and professional. I usually tell them to practice attentiveness and concentration. But I probably should tell them to adapt a healthier lifestyle. For over a decade a variety of studies have implicated lifestyle in memory function. A rigorous new study confirms these results. An Israeli research team studied 823 participants, aged 22-37 years, using brain scans taken during a difficult memory task, post-scan memory tests, and numerous measures of health and lifestyle. The brain scans identified the brain areas that particularly engage in working memory tasks, most important of which were the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, parietal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex. These then served as a frame of reference to check for correlations...

Memories that stick with us for a lifetime are those that fit other things we remember—but have a slightly weird twist. The most effective memory strategy is to relate new information with something you already know, but do it with a weird twist. This is the basic principle of well-known mnemonic strategies, like acrostics or "Memory Palace." The idea of acrostics is to construct a sentence in which the first letter of each word reminds you of what you are trying to remember, as in the names of the 12 cranial nerves: "On Old Olympus Towering Tops A Finn and A German Viewed Some Hops" (olfactory, optic, oculomotor, trochlear, trigeminal, abducens, facial, auditory, glossopharyngeal, vagus, spinal accessory, hypoglossal). Acrostics and all other mnemonic aids work best if you create mental-image representations—the weirder the better. It is the  weirdness that makes things especially memorable. There are three basic techniques: 1.       Subject-Verb-Object. ...

Most everybody believes that one becomes wiser with age and experience. People obviously vary across a wide spectrum of foolish to wise. We all have opinions about our own degree of wisdom compared to others, but is there an objective way to measure wisdom? A group of researchers at U.C. San Diego believes that wisdom can be objectively measured. They tested their ideas on 524 adults, aged 25-104 years, selected from an on-going longitudinal investigation called the Successful Aging Evaluation (SAGE) study. The study population involved near equal numbers of males and females, with more than three-fourths claiming to be non-Latino white. A majority had some college education. The study was funded by three grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, the Veterans Administration, and the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. The researchers developed a series of questions that focused on physical, cognitive, and psychosocial aspects of successful aging across the adult lifespan....

Our lives our filled with making choices. Sometimes we make reasoned choices and sometimes we make irrational choices. The drivers of irrational choices were examined in a series of studies by Daniel Kahnemann and Amos Tversky, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for their work. Their experiments showed that humans will make irrational choices when the cost-benefit relations are manipulated in certain ways. They established two generic modes of cognitive function: an intuitive mode in which judgments and decisions are made automatically and rapidly, and a controlled mode, which is deliberate and slower. Cost-benefit parameters need not involve money, but they often do, such as "should I wait for the new cars go on sale" to "how much am I willing to save for retirement." I had the good fortune back in the early 1970s when these Nobel Prize discoveries were being made to be part of a team at Texas A&M that documented and elucidated the founding "behavioral e...

When you encounter new information and want to remember it, the formation of a memory is enormously affected by what happens immediately afterwards. The most common problem is that you think of something else, and that something else erases what you just learned from your working memory “scratchpad” before it has time to set up in long-term memory. The way to avoid this problem is to do something with the new learning right away. Memory scientists often call this a “production” effect. That is, if you produce something from the new learning right away, it not only reduces interfering distractions but also strengthens the encoding and speeds up memory formation into lasting form. Common production activities might include using the new information in a new way, to apply it in some kind of activity, such as solving a problem. This option is not always available, but there are other approaches, such as hearing the same information at the same time you read or see it. The most common produ...