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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...

Some readers may think you have to be smart to think critically. But a corollary is that learning how to think critically makes you smart. The assumption is that one can learn to think critically (that is, be smart). The assumption is correct. Here, I hope to show you how you can  become smarter by learning critical thinking skills. Require Yourself to Think Critically When you read or listening to others talk, force yourself to become more attentive and engaged with the information. Asking questions assures engagement. Learn and Look for Common Thinking Errors Unfortunately, most adults are not taught formal logic, even in college. College logic courses are electives and are made confusing by obtuse premises, propositions, and equations. But c ommon-sense logic can suffice. I have posted a list of common thinking errors elsewhere  (1).  Here are some of the more serious thinking errors: APPEAL TO AUTHORITY OR CONSENSUS: attempting to justify the conclusion by quoting an ...

In most people, their brains get smaller as they age. It is not so much that neurons die but that their terminals and synaptic junctions shrivel. A known cause is the over-secretion of cortisol by stress, but perhaps there are also other age-related causes. However, shrinkage with age is not inevitable. Certain people are "super-agers," defined as adults over 80 with memory at least as good as normal middle-aged adults. A usually reliable index for decline in memory ability is the degree of brain shrinkage, specifically cortical volume. Brain-scan studies show that super-agers have thicker layers of cortex than do others of the same age. Thus, their cortex has not shrunk as much as average elderly or they had more to start with. It is possible that something about the lifestyle of super-agers protected them from brain atrophy. It is not convenient to know how much cortical volume the elderly had in their youth. But the second option has been tested in a study that compared th...

No one is born honorable. If you doubt me, just watch little kids at play. Scholarly research has confirms the point. Michael Lewis, a prominent psychologist at Rutgers, has conducted many studies of how children naturally lie and deceive and are even encouraged to do so by well-meaning parents. Certain ways of expressing emotion are taught to be acceptable while others are not. One experiment, for example, showed that children are usually taught to express sadness when their mother leaves them with a baby sitter. But the reality was that children were not sad and recovered quickly when the mother left. Other examples are how children are taught to express responses to minor insults or injuries. Some kids are taught that it is alright to over-react. Lewis and his colleagues conducted some classical experiments in young children that revealed how their tendency for false behavior changed with age. They secretly videotaped children in an honesty test in which they were told not to peek a...