How can I improve my short term memory? Q: How can I improve my memory? Is there a daily exercise I can do to improve it? A: The most important component of memory is attention. By choosing to attend to something and focus on it, you create a personal interaction with it, which gives it personal meaning, making it easier to remember.
Elaboration and repetition are the most common ways of creating that personal interaction. One common technique used by students, is actually, not that helpful. These techniques do help you improve your memory on a behavioral level, but not on a fundamental brain structure level. Focus Alertness, focus, concentration, motivation, and heightened awareness are largely a matter of attitude. If you want to learn or remember something, concentrate on just that one thing. Strategy: When you learn something new, take breaks so that the facts won’t interfere with one another as you study them. Keep reading… Sleep, Tetris, Memory and the Brain. As part of our ongoing Author Speaks Series, we are honored to present today this excellent article by Dr.
Shannon Moffett, based on her illuminating and engaging book. Enjoy! (and please go to sleep soon if you are reading this late Monday night). ———— Two years ago I finished a book on the mind/brain, called The Three Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock its Mysteries . Fast-forward to the present, when I am a resident in emergency medicine at a busy inner-city trauma center; I have two-year-old twins and a husband with a 60-hour-a-week job of his own. Sleep is so obvious a physiologic need (from insects to mammals, all animals sleep) that it doesn’t even occur to most of us to wonder why we have to do it—why in the world would we need to lie down, paralyzed, for a third of our lives, with our brains in some sort of auto-pilot chaos? Declarative Memory (Explicit Memory) and Procedural Memory (Implicit Memory) - Types of Memory.
Long-term memory is often divided into two further main types: explicit (or declarative) memory and implicit (or procedural) memory. Declarative memory (“knowing what”) is memory of facts and events, and refers to those memories that can be consciously recalled (or "declared"). It is sometimes called explicit memory, since it consists of information that is explicitly stored and retrieved, although it is more properly a subset of explicit memory. Declarative memory can be further sub-divided into episodic memory and semantic memory. Procedural memory (“knowing how”) is the unconscious memory of skills and how to do things, particularly the use of objects or movements of the body, such as tying a shoelace, playing a guitar or riding a bike.
These memories are typically acquired through repetition and practice, and are composed of automatic sensorimotor behaviours that are so deeply embedded that we are no longer aware of them. Why do You Turn Down the Radio When You’re Lost?
How the Mind Works | Video channel on TED.com. How Great Entrepreneurs Think. What distinguishes great entrepreneurs? Discussions of entrepreneurial psychology typically focus on creativity, tolerance for risk, and the desire for achievement—enviable traits that, unfortunately, are not very teachable. So Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business, set out to determine how expert entrepreneurs think, with the goal of transferring that knowledge to aspiring founders. While still a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon, Sarasvathy—with the guidance of her thesis supervisor, the Nobel laureate Herbert Simon—embarked on an audacious project: to eavesdrop on the thinking of the country's most successful entrepreneurs as they grappled with business problems. She required that her subjects have at least 15 years of entrepreneurial experience, have started multiple companies—both successes and failures—and have taken at least one company public.
Do the doable, then push it Here's another: Woo partners first Sweat competitors later. Creativity and Innovation Quotes | LeadingThoughts - LeadershipNow.com. Learn How to Think Different(ly) - Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen. By Jeff Dyer and Hal Gregersen | 10:24 AM September 27, 2011 In the Economist review of our book, The Innovator’s DNA, the reviewer wondered whether genius-level innovators such as Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, and Steve Jobs challenge the idea that working adults can really learn how to think differently and become innovators. We don’t think so. Remember, it was Steve Jobs who jump-started the now-famous “Think Different” advertising campaign as a way to inspire consumers and recharge Apple’s innovation efforts.
It worked. Reams of relevant research (including our own) proves Jobs right. But neither Steve Jobs nor Apple nor any other high-profile innovator or company has a corner on the think-different market. Take Gavin Symanowitz, whom we recently met in South Africa. Innovators (of new businesses, products, and processes) spend almost 50% more time trying to think different compared to non-innovators. Just do It. Shake it up. Repeat. As a leader, how often do you think different? Thinking Methods: Creative Problem Solving. They further divided the six stages into three phases, as follows: 1. Exploring the Challenge (Objective Finding, Fact Finding, and Problem Finding), Generating Ideas (Idea Finding), and Preparing for Action (Solution Finding and Acceptance Finding).
Description: Since the arrival of the now classical Osborn-Parnes structure, any number of academic and business entities have re-sorted and renamed the stages and phases of what we now call the Creative Problem Solving Process (CPS). However, the originators' fundamental approach remains in tact. The Creative Problem Solving Institute of Buffalo, New York, has finessed the Osborn-Parnes process to include a divergent and a convergent stage within each of the six stages.
In his 1988 book, Techniques of Structured Problems, Arthur B. Mess FindingData FindingProblem FindingIdea FindingSolution Finding Where to Learn CPS. Thinking Methods. Brain Workshop - a Dual N-Back game. Games for the Brain. Category:Puzzles. Realistic Lateral Thinking Puzzles. Lateral Thinking Puzzles, unlike most puzzles, are inexact. In a sense, they are a hybrid between puzzles and storytelling. In each puzzle, some clues to a scenario are given, but the clues don't tell the full story. Your job is to fill in the details and complete the story. Obviously, there is usually more than one answer to any given puzzle, but, in general, only one solution is truly satisfying. You can try solving these puzzles on your own -- that's certainly a legitimate way to go about this -- but usually you can have more fun if you involve other people.
The way this works is, you look at the answer (maybe you want to try the puzzle on your own first!) Warning: For some reason, these puzzles have a tendency to be rather morbid. The scenarios given on this page are realistic, if unlikely. Brain Teasers, Puzzles, Riddles, Trivia and Games. Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain. Michael Merzenich on re-wiring the brain. Physical Exercise and Brain Health. What is the connection between physical and mental exercises? Do they have additive effects on brain health? Are they redundant? Let’s start by reviewing what we know about the effects of physical exercise on the brain.
The effect of physical exercise on cognitive performance Early studies compared groups of people who exercised to groups of people who did not exercise much. Results showed that people who exercised usually had better performance in a range of cognitive tasks compared to non-exercisers. Laurin and colleagues (2001) even suggested that moderate and high levels of physical activity were associated with lower risk for Alzheimer’s disease and other dementias. The problem with these studies is that the exercisers and the non-exercisers may differ on other factors than just exercise. The solution to this problem is to randomly assigned people to either an aerobic training group or a control group. Keep reading… Women's exercise linked to lower cognitive skill - health - 07 January 2011.
WOMEN who habitually take strenuous exercise might be at risk of damaging their cognitive function later in life. Strenuous exercise is known to reduce oestrogen levels in women and girls. This can delay the start of menstruation, and can lead to irregular periods in adult women. Low levels of oestrogen in premenopausal women have been linked to impaired mental function in later life. Mary Tierney at the University of Toronto, Canada, reasoned that strenuous exercise might therefore lead to impaired cognition in later life.
She asked 90 healthy post-menopausal women to report their life-long exercise habits, and then tested their cognitive ability. The overall benefits of regular exercise are well established, but Tierney says the possible impact of strenuous exercise on cognition should be investigated further to see if it is significant. Exercise Improves Old Brains. The moment of truth has arrived, again. The holidays have passed, the leftovers are dwindling and you have renewed your annual New Year's resolution to get back into shape... for real. Don't worry, you are not alone. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), 63 percent of Americans have a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 25 (defined as overweight), while a quarter are greater than 30 (obese).
As we get older, those extra pounds start to affect other areas of our health, contributing to the onset of diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol and even sexual function. Several new studies in the last month have now built stronger links between our levels of physical activity and the health of our most important body part, the brain. Conditions such as dementia, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and even mild age-related memory loss can be delayed by regular physical activity. Shrinking brain What the aging brain needs is a pumped-up blood flow. Make new brain cells Increase blood flow.
Brain is not fully mature until 30s and 40s. (PhysOrg.com) -- New research from the UK shows the brain continues to develop after childhood and puberty, and is not fully developed until people are well into their 30s and 40s. The findings contradict current theories that the brain matures much earlier. Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist with the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said until around a decade ago many scientists had "pretty much assumed that the human brain stopped developing in early childhood," but recent research has found that many regions of the brain continue to develop for a long time afterwards.
The prefrontal cortex is the region at the front of the brain just behind the forehead, and is an area of the brain that undergoes the longest period of development. Prof. In earlier research Professor Blakemore studied the brains of teenagers in detail, as reported in PhysOrg. Explore further: Study: Our brains compensate for aging. Religion May Cause Brain Atrophy -- Science of the Spirit. Faith can open your mind but it can also cause your brain to shrink at a different rate, research suggests. Researchers at Duke University Medical Centre in the US claim to have discovered a correlation between religious practices and changes in the brains of older adults. The study, published in the open-access science journal, Public Library of Science ONE, asked 268 people aged 58 to 84 about their religious group, spiritual practices and life-changing religious experiences. Changes in the volume of their hippocampus, the region of the brain associated with learning and memory, were tracked using MRI scans, over two to eight years.
Protestants who did not identify themselves as born-again were found to have less atrophy in the hippocampus region than did born-again Protestants, Catholics or those with no religious affiliation. Although the brain tends to shrink with age, atrophy in the hippocampus has been linked with depression and Alzheimer's disease. Analysis Of Neurotech Industry - News Markets. Pawan Sinha on how brains learn to see. Time on the Brain: How You Are Always Living In the Past, and Other Quirks of Perception. I always knew we humans have a rather tenuous grip on the concept of time, but I never realized quite how tenuous it was until a couple of weeks ago, when I attended a conference on the nature of time organized by the Foundational Questions Institute. This meeting, even more than FQXi’s previous efforts, was a mashup of different disciplines: fundamental physics, philosophy, neuroscience, complexity theory.
Crossing academic disciplines may be overrated, as physicist-blogger Sabine Hossenfelder has pointed out, but it sure is fun. Like Sabine, I spend my days thinking about planets, dark matter, black holes—they have become mundane to me. But brains—now there’s something exotic. So I sat rapt during the neuroscientists’ talks as they described how our minds perceive the past, present, and future. “Perceive” maybe isn’t strong enough a word: our minds construct the past, present, and future, and sometimes get it badly wrong.
Whenever I hear about such tests, I brace myself for bad news. Brain Food: How to Eat Smart. It's common to resolve to lose weight, but any sane person dreads a diet's dulling effect on the brain. In fact, many studies have shown that counting calories, carbs or fat grams, is truly distracting — to the point that it taxes short-term memory. But how we eat can affect our minds at more fundamental levels, too. Whether you are seeking brain food for exams or just want to be at your sharpest ever day, here are five things you should know about feeding your brain: 1. The brain, which accounts for 2 percent of our body weight, sucks down roughly 20 percent of our daily calories.
More recently evolved areas of the brain, such as the frontal cortex (it's like the CEO of the brain), are particularly sensitive to falling glucose levels, while brain areas regulating vital functions are more hardy, said Leigh Gibson of Roehampton University in England. This is not to suggest that we should constantly slurp soda to keep our brains functioning optimally. 2. 3. 4. 5. This Is Your Brain On Caffeine. Ever miss your daily cup of coffee and subsequently get a pounding headache? According to reports from consumers of coffee and other caffeinated products, caffeine withdrawal is often characterized by a headache, fatigue, feeling less alert, less energetic and experiencing difficulty concentrating.
Caffeine withdrawal is at its worst between 24 to 48 hours and lasts up to a week. Researchers from the University of Vermont College of Medicine and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine sought to investigate the biological mechanisms of caffeine withdrawal in a paper published recently in the online edition of the scientific journal Psychopharmacology. They looked at brain electrical activity and blood flow during caffeine withdrawal to examine what was taking place physiologically during acute caffeine abstinence, including the likely mechanism underlying the common 'caffeine withdrawal headache.' Think faster focus better and remember moreRewiring our brain to stay younger... Brain Fitness Program and Neuroplasticity.