clair073

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...

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. ...

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...

"You are as old as you think you are," the saying goes. Well, not quite. You, that is the inner you in your brain, is as old as your brain is. But your brain age may or may not correlate with chronological age. The other day at my gym workout, I again saw a young black guy, built like Captain America, whose workout schedule sometimes overlaps with mine. We had not met, and out of the blue he came up to me and said, “You are my inspiration. You inspire me to be able to work out like you when I get your age.” Wow! I inspire somebody! Then my balloon popped when I realized that he knew I was old just by looking at me. My body may not look like I’m 83, but I guess hair loss and the lines in my face betray me. The point of this story is that the bodily organs do not have the same rate of aging. Skin ages rather conspicuously in most older people. Specific organs may age at different rates depending on what they have been exposed to, for example skin and sun, liver and alcohol, lun...

I first got interested in memory training at age 15 when my dad was a salesman for the Dale Carnegie leadership course, which included a section on memory training. My dad taught me some tricks that enabled me to memorize the gist of what was on every page of a magazine, by page number, in 30 minutes. I used to put on demonstrations for prospective enrollees. Before the recruitment meeting started, the leader would tell the audience, "Everybody see Billy here. Stand up Billy. I am going to give him this latest magazine issue, which he has never seen, and let him study it for 30 minutes. Then we will interrupt the meeting and you can ask him what is on any given page. Or you can tell him what is on a page, and he can tell you the page number." To my own astonishment, I could do it and it was not that hard. The basic gimmick was first to memorize a number code that converted page numbers into a visual image. For example, the code for 20 was "noose," as in a hangman...

As a college professor for many decades, I am always amazed at how so many students pass exams while having so little understanding. If I taught math, it would probably be different, because the task in math is to solve problems, which you can't do if you don't understand how to construct and solve appropriate equations. But for most other subjects, it is amazing how much students can learn with so little understanding. This problem also exists in the real world outside of academia. I have recently become engaged as a volunteer tutor in our community's citizenship preparation class for immigrants. This past week the topic was George Washington, and the two instructors spent a lot of time teaching trivial things, such as when he was born, where he was born, what he was (general, president), the name of his home. Nothing was presented about his philosophy about freedom and government. I had to remind the teachers and the class that after he had done such a good job in his two...

Got kids or grandkids in school? Odds are they are not getting enough sleep, and it is hurting their learning and grades. This is a special problem for older adolescents. At this age, the biological clock shifts and makes them stay up too late if they need to get up at 6-7 A.M. to get ready for school. Kids this age need about 9 hours of sleep a night. So what is the relationship to learning? Two things: 1. When students are drowsy during class, they can't focus attention and will not encode new information effectively. Sometimes they even fall asleep in class, which means they are not encoding anything. 2. Sleep provides an uninterrupted mental environment in which the brain rehearses the events of that day. As documented in dozens of peer-reviewed research reports, this rehearsal promotes consolidation of fragile temporary memory into more permanent form. Now, two new studies reveal what happens during sleep to accomplish this consolidation task. Just as a computer writes to a ha...

It is well known that stress can impair memory. Everyone has had some experience of this kind. As a student suffering test anxiety, grades are likely to suffer. In high-stakes social or business interactions, the stress may well cause memory to fail us, as when Presidential candidate Rick Perry forgot the name of the agency he wanted to abolish if elected, or when we forget a friend’s name in the process of making a social introduction. How does stress do this? Is there anything we can do about it? First, we need to know what stressful events do to the body and brain. Brain freezes, like Rick Perry's, probably occur because thinking can get so preoccupied with the stress-inducing stimuli that other thoughts cannot emerge. But other kinds of stress-induced memory impaired come from the well-known “fight or flight” response in which stress activates the release of adrenalin into the blood stream. Adrenalin has many bodily effects that support fight or flight, such as raising heart ra...

Everyone has feelings about those who have been close to them: parents, siblings, spouses, and colleagues. Those feelings are usually formed from memories of past interactions with those people. When those memories are negative, they can poison relationships and lead to terrible results: family feuds, alienated siblings, estrangement between children and parents, divorce, law suits, and assorted vendettas. The saddest part of all is that research is showing that many of these negative memories can be wrong. Memories are seldom fully literal. Memories are constructed, not recorded like an audio tape. The brain decides how an experience is to be packaged as a narrative to remember. We even generate fictions for experiences that do not involve our own inter-personal relationships. Witness the conflicting stories about how many planes struck the World Trade Center or about the Ferguson "hands up, don't shoot" imagined incident. The criminal justice system now downplays eye-wi...

The Fall return to school is a good time to remind students and parents about learning strategies. Lectures still dominate teaching approaches. In spite of such teaching reforms as "hands-on" learning, small group collaborations, project-based learning, and others, teachers generally can't resist the temptation to be a "sage of the stage," instead of a "guide on the side." Maybe that's a good thing, because many students are not temperamentally equipped to be active learners. Rather, they have been conditioned by television and movies, as well as their former teachers, to function passively, as an audience. Students are even conditioned to be passive by the way we test learning with multiple-choice questions, which require a passive recognition of a provided correct answer among three or four incorrect ones. The other major teaching device, reading, is also problematic. Too many students don't like to read academic material. They want somebody ...