clair073

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 ...

We live in the age of multitasking. Though a phenomenon of the young, older folks are being dragged into the age by the digital revolution in mobile electronic devices. Youngsters, as digital natives, are wired to multi-task, but they don't realize how multitasking impairs their impaired thinking skills. We call our phones "smart," but they can actually make us dumb. This may be one of the reasons that under performance in schools is so common. Microsoft clip art Older folks tend to be amazed and awed by the multitasking ability of the young. But those in all generations should realize that multitasking does not make you smarter or more productive. In school, multitasking interferes with learning. In the workplace, multitasking interferes with productivity and promotes stress and fatigue. Multitasking creates an illusion of parallel activity, but actually it requires mental switching from one task to another. This drains the glucose fuel needed by the brain, making the br...

Do you deserve credit for your honest achievements and blame for your failures? No, say an increasing number of philosophers and scientists. They say that everything you do is commanded from your unconscious mind, which you can't consciously control. The conscious "you" is just a superfluous observer. Free will is thus regarded as an illusion (Fig. 1). My new book, "Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will" (Academic Press), challenges the science used to justify these counter-intuitive ideas. Figure 1. Illustration of the concept that free will is an illusion. In this view, the actions that your brain commands come from the mechanical gears of an unconscious mind. Conscious mind is informed after the fact, creating the illusion that one's conscious mind commanded the act. How free will is defined affects the conclusion about whether humans have any free will. As defined here, free will exists when a person generates thinking and behaviors...

After an injury or pain-inducing experience, the body often heals itself, but a chronic pain may continue even after healing. National Institute of Medicine surveys suggest that some 116 million American adults are in chronic pain. Chronic pain is often accompanied by such emotions as anxiety, depression, and a significant reduction in quality of life. Drugs like opiates, steroids, and non-steroidal anti-inflammatories can be very effective in reducing acute pain, but may have little or no effect when post-healing chronic pain sets in. How can pain persist when the original cause is gone? Clues have emerged from brain scans of chronic pain patients that show no sign of augmented activity in pain-mediated areas but do show increased activity in emotional and motivational areas of brain. The thought has now emerged in several research labs that chronic pain may actually be a memory. As if the chronic pain itself is not bad enough, the pain learning process may induce degenerative changes...

The price we pay for living is dying. That is, to stay alive, our body must burn oxygen, and that process inevitably yields toxic metabolites called free radicals. Free radicals are highly reactive because the outer shell of electrons is incomplete. Atoms are attracted to other atoms with incomplete electron shells. That is, they share electrons to form a chemical bond. An atom that has a full outer shell tends not to enter into chemical reactions. The damage comes from the free radical stripping electrons off of target atoms and converting them into a chain-reaction production of free radicals. This changes the target atoms so that their normal function is disabled. Such damage occurs in all sorts of molecules, including the vital molecules RNA and DNA. So how do anti-oxidant chemicals help? They neutralize radicals by donating electrons to complete the outer shells of free radicals without becoming free radicals themselves. Think of anti-oxidants as scavengers that go around scooping...

Across the nation, there are three common ways to increase school choice: charter schools, vouchers (subsidies) to help pay for private school, and tax credits for companies that donate supplemental funds for voucher programs. All three approaches have serious deficiencies, and I propose two better alternatives. But first, what is wrong with the current options? Charter schools are relatively unregulated, compared to regular public schools. They often are special-purpose schools that do not offer solutions for the broad swath of typical students. A common problem with school-choice options such as vouchers and tax credits is that such bills will be tied up in court challenges on the grounds that public money is being diverted to private, profit-making schools. The widely popular Nevada program, for example, is now held up in court. Voucher programs provide only part, often around a half, of the cost of private schools. In the Nevada plan, the state transfers up to $5,700 per child dire...

I have written several earlier posts on the value of teaching and learning cursive. A recent infographic provides a nice summary of the advantages of handwriting over the keyboard. Handwriting engages the brain more deeply in creative thinking. Among its many advantages claimed in the infographic , handwriting:   Provides children with a clearer understanding of how letters form words, sentences, and meanings. Teaches reading skills Improves memory retention Promotes critical and creative thinking (note taking, mind maps, etc.) And now there is a slick newway of teaching cursive , invented by Linda Shrewsbury. She analyzed all the alphabet letters to see if there were common pen strokes that were common to many letters. She found that handwriting all the letters could be mastered by learning just four simple pen strokes. So she wrote a book, Cursive Logic, that explains how to learn cursive by first learning these four basic strokes. Instead of spending hours, da...