Lesson Course 3. Paying Attention

How attentive are you? One way to check is to run this little thought experiment: sit quietly in a chair, with a second-hand watch or clock nearby, close your eyes, and check to see how long you can go without thinking of anything. If you can go more than 5 seconds without any thought, that is far better than average.

What does this little test say about attention? Actually, you are not paying attention as such, you are paying attention to not paying attention. In other words, you just measured your limited capacity to resist distraction. Resisting distraction is the other side of the focus coin. If you can resist distraction, you can focus on any object of thought without being distracted. So what? Being able to focus is a skill that is crucially important to developing your ability to remember.

         There are ways to develop the ability to focus. Before I get into that, however, let me illustrate a related point. You perhaps have heard the instruction: “Do not think about pink elephants.” I tell you now, “Do not think about pink elephants.” Were you able to not think about pink elephants? Unlikely. Real elephants are not pink. A pink elephant is such a compelling image so that you are hard pressed to not see it in your mind’s eye.

Make Memory Targets Compelling

This makes a point about focus. If the target of focus is compelling, it is hard not to focus on it. Thus, whatever you need and want to focus on is easier to attend if you make it compelling. If a target of focus is compelling, it becomes encoded more strongly. You learned in Lesson 1 that encoding is the first crucial step in the memorization process cycle. One of the best ways for a compelling focus of attention is to make a target of attention a mental image, either a literal simulation of the actual target or a metaphorical representation of it. Generally, the most robust images are not literal but those that are ridiculously exaggerated (like pink elephants). This tactic is the basis used by “memory athletes” who compete in international contests to see who can memorize the most material in the shortest amount of time. I will say much more about specific mental imagery tactics in Lesson 9 where mnemonics are explained.

The other obvious way to make compelling memory targets is to motivate yourself to remember. As I explained in my book on The Learning Skills Cycle, the centerpiece hub of the cycle is motivation to learn. Approach learning tasks with a zeal that drives you to do all things needed to memorize and the success in learning then strengthens the motivation to learn more. As I explained in the story about my “conversion” in the 7^th grade, once I learned how to get to the top of the class and how good that felt, I was motivated to achieve that standing every year.

Avoiding Distraction

While it is true that the brain processes information in parallel, conscious memorization operates serially. That is, you consciously attend one thing at a time, switching at high speeds from one targets of attention to another. Any time you switch targets, you disrupt the processes of encoding and initiation of consolidation. This explains why multi-tasking greatly impairs memorization.

School environments are notorious for creating distractions. Students in a classroom have to make special effort to stay focused on instructional material.

Learning to Focus

Conscious focus of attention is a skill that can be learned through deliberate practice. The best proof comes from Hindu ascetics who do such astonishing things as voluntarily regulating their heart rate and blood pressure or lying on a bed of nails. The Buddhist meditation practices provide a practical way for anybody to train their brains to focus—you don’t have to be a Buddhist. The technique that works for me is called “mindfulness meditation.” The objective is to be mindful of what you are thinking and to force yourself to think of only one thing, usually slow, deep breathing. All extraneous silent mental chatter and images are pushed out of consciousness.

See how long you can sustain sole focus on your breathing and keep out all intruding thoughts. Notice all things associated with the breathing, but nothing else. At first you may feel aches and pains you have not been attending because you were thinking of other things. Ignoring these aches consciously during meditation adds to the value of the exercise. Hear the sound of the moving air with each breath. Feel the pulse in your neck. If you don’t feel it, crook your neck or lie down to feel it in your back or hear it by turning your ear to a pillow. Notice the rhythm and the gradual slowing of breathing. Feel your clothes shifting position and the tension flowing out of your muscles, first in the jaw, then back and legs. The first time you try it, you likely will lose focus within a couple of seconds. But after a few days of 15-minute sessions, you will realize your brain has learned how to focus for several minutes or more. Not only does this kind of meditation teach your brain how to concentrate, it also lowers blood pressure, reduces memory-impairing stress, and contributes to peace of mind.

As you develop the capacity to focus, reinforce the training by being more attentive to every target of attention that you are trying to memorize. Also, notice what is associated with the information you are trying to memorize. If you are learning about an historical event, like the First Continental Congress, notice what is going on in the meeting hall, where it took place, why that place was chosen, what prompted the meeting, who stood out in the meeting, and so on. In short, notice the context in which things exist. Paying attention to such details at the time of initial encoding provides huge numbers of cues that strengthen the encoding and can serve as handles to help you retrieve the information in the future. The context obviously aids in understanding as well. Sometimes, just the understanding helps you figure out something you actually failed to remember.

Summary:

•   1 To strengthen encoding and the initial stages of memory consolidation, make memory targets compelling. The best way is to represent the targets as mental images.
•      Do not multi-task. Alter you learning environment as best you can to reduce distracting stimuli and thoughts.
•      Train your brain to focus. Make time for a 15-minute mindfulness meditation session every day and try to focus on your every experience throughout the day.
•      Don’t go around in a mental fog. Notice things. Be consciously aware of everything.

Next Lesson: Week 4. Think and Get Smart

Cursive Is Not Dead Yet

The national education standards, Common Core, aimed to kill the teaching of cursive. But is not dead—just wounded.

Yesterday, I did a radio interview on WHO in DesMoines. WHO bills itself as the “America’s #1 Audio Company.” I remember fondly listening to WHO over the three years when I lived in Iowa many years ago. The Justin Brady Radio Show people had read one of my articles on why teaching cursive to children is valuable, and they wanted to explore things further. As many people know the Common Core standards did away with the teaching of cursive, presumably because it is not relevant in the digital age where children write by tapping a screen or keyboard.

My state of Texas, notable for doing its own thing, has refused to endorse Common Core, but still the state did not require the teaching of cursive. Now Texas mandates the teaching of cursive. In accordance with the state's new school guidelines, second graders will be taught how to write cursive letters before advancing to third grade, where they'll be expected to "write complete words, thoughts and answers legibly in cursive writing leaving appropriate spaces between words." When students get to fourth grade, they'll be required to write all of their assignments in cursive.

Justin Brady wanted to know what I thought about all this. My first reaction was this: “If we don’t need to teach cursive, why do we need to teach printing by hand?” Cursive is just a refinement of printing letters. Why don’t we just show them pictures of the letters and teach them to punch a key for the letters? In fact, that may well be the next educational “reform.”

We teach printing so kids can more easily learn their ABCs. We could teach ABCs by showing children which letters to tap on a screen. Maybe in some states that think they are so progressive, the teaching of printing letters will be on the way out. However, the reason learning to print letters by hand matters is that it demands mental engagement. A child has to think about the structure of each letter, and in the process of thinking about how to draw it, learns and remembers what the letters look like. Hand printing is an example of the “production effect” principle that benefits memory. We remember things better if we reproduce the learning, either by drawing, writing, or telling. One of the fundamental but unheralded principles of learning is that the best way to remember anything is to think about it.

Learning cursive builds on this principle and provides additional benefits. Cursive has two special advantages over printing: it promotes a higher-level mental development, and it can nurture a child’s emotions and motivation for learning and achievement.

Brain Development

Cursive should be easy to learn once one knows how to print letters, because there are many good books explaining the slight modifications needed to turn printed letters into script. But cursive demands more hand-eye coordination, a change in brain wiring that creates the mental infrastructure for many later uses in real life. Hand-finger dexterity becomes crucial in later life if a child wants to play a musical instrument, excel in sports, manipulate tools, or even master a computer keyboard. In my blog post that Justin had read, I had described how writing in cursive activated many more areas of brain than mere printing. It is training the brain to recruit neural resources to solve problems.

Excelling at cursive does another important thing. The learner has to pay more attention and focus on what needs to be done to make each letter and attractive. To do a good job at cursive requires self-discipline. Who can argue that kids don’t need to learn focus and self-discipline? Our multi-tasking culture is teaching kids to be scatterbrained. All kids have some level of attention deficit.

Learning cursive successfully also incidentally programs the brain for the habit of deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is a mental heuristic that enables a person to pay attention to the details of what is needed to improve a skill. If an adult wants to improve her golf game, she has to do more than just repeat a swing of the club. She has to think about what is the best way to improve the swing with each attempt.

Motivational Benefit

Learning to write cursive well has enormous motivational and emotional benefits. First, writing cursive is a form of drawing, and children naturally love to draw. The child happily takes ownership of their cursive creations, being proud of having a skill that generates such elegant writing. They can even develop a personal style, which is gratifying in their limited world that demands so much conformity. They discover that they have powers of mastery, which motivates them to do better in other school work. Of course, they also discover the practical benefit of cursive, which is that they can write much faster than printing, which helps them greatly in taking schoolwork notes.

In recalling my own childhood, I remember that I did not like school until the seventh grade. Before then I hated school and made poor grades. It may have been no accident that I started to like school and make all As in that year when I also had a couple months of penmanship class. I knew how to write cursive earlier, but penmanship taught me how to write cursive that was attractive, not perhaps as elegant as the script in the Declaration of Independence, but still something I created that I could be proud of. I still have attractive cursive today.

So, I say “hats off” to states like Texas that are restoring the hallowed place of cursive in elementary education. My only criticism is that second graders are not likely to have the brain development and hand-eye coordination required to create attractive cursive. Children need refresher instruction when they are older, as I was lucky enough to get in a couple months of the seventh grade. If a child does not learn to do cursive well, many of the emotional and motivational benefits do not occur. In fact, if their cursive is ugly and unreadable, the emotions are negative.

Nine Steps to Remember What You Learn

The three most important times for learning are: Before, During, and (soon) After.

Before

1. Bring your “A game.” Choose to be positive and interested. Being bored is a choice— a self-defeating choice.

2. Check your foundation. Come prepared.

3. Expect to remember.

During

4. Pay Attention. Ask questions.

5. Take good notes.

6. THINK!

(soon) After

7. Avoid mental interference. Use quiet, uninterrupted reflection during rehearsal.

8. Apply what you just learned

9. Self- test. Really test, don't just "look over." Repeat several times in the next hours and days.

"Memory Medic" is author of Memory Power 101 and Better Grades, Less Effort. Both are available at Amazon.com.

Happy Thoughts Can Make You More Competent

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:” some people might argue that the U.S. Constitution endorses hedonism, and indeed many politicians want to ignore or get rid of the Constitution, but not necessarily because of hedonism. We should not be dismissive about encouraging people to pursue happiness. Happiness can be good for your brain. Depression is surely bad for your brain.

Positive mood states promote more effective thinking and problem solving. A recent scholarly report[1] reviews the literature demonstrating that positive mood broadens the scope of attentiveness, enhances semantic associations over a wide range, improves task shifting, and improves problem-solving capability. The review also documents the changes in brain activation patterns induced by positive mood in subjects while solving problems. Especially important is the dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex.

Published studies reveal that a variety of techniques are used to momentarily manipulate mood. These have included making subjects temporarily happy or sad by asking subjects to recall emotionally corresponding past experiences or to view film clips or hear words that trigger happy or sad feelings,

The effect of happiness on broadened attentiveness arises because the brain has better cognitive flexibility and executive control, which in turn makes it easier to be more flexible and creative. Happy problem solvers are better able to select and act upon useful solutions that otherwise never consciously surface. Happiness reduces perseverative tendencies for errant problem-solving strategies. The broadened attentiveness, for example, allows people to attend to more stimuli, both in external visual space and in internal semantic space, which in turn enables more holistic processing. For example, in one cited study, experimenters manipulated subjects’ momentary mood and then measured performance on a task involving matching of visual objects based on their global versus local shapes. Happy moods yielded better global matching.

Other experiments report broader word association performance when subjects are manipulated to be happier. For example, subjects in a neutral mood would typically regard the word “pen” as a writing tool and would associate it with words like pencil or paper. But positive mood subjects would think also of pen as an enclosure and associate it with words like barn or pigs. This effect has been demonstrated with practical effect in physicians, who, when in a happy mood, thought of more disease possibilities in making a differential diagnosis.

The review authors reported their own experiment on beneficial happy mood effects on insightfulness, using a task in which subjects were given three words and asked to think of a fourth word that could be combined into a compound word or phrase. For example, an insightful response to “tooth, potato, and heart” might be “sweet tooth, sweet potato, and sweetheart.” Generating such insight typically requires one to suppress dominant “knee jerk” responses such as associating tooth with pain and recognizing that pain does not fit potato while at the same time becoming capable of switching to non-dominant alternatives.

Other cited experiments showed that happy mood improved performance on “Duncker’s candle task.”  Here, subjects are given a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches, and are asked to attach a candle to the wall in a way that will burn without dripping wax on the floor. Subjects in a happy mood were more able to realize that the box could be a platform for the candle when the box is tacked to the wall.  

Such effects of happy moods seem to arise from increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas that numerous prior studies have demonstrated as crucial parts of the brain’s executive control network. Similar effects have been observed in EEG studies. Other research suggests that the happiness effect is mediated by increased release of dopamine in the cortex that serves to up-regulate executive control.

The review authors described a meta-analysis of 49 positive-psychology manipulation studies showing that momentary happiness is readily manipulated by such strategies as deliberate optimistic thinking, increased attention to and memory of happy experiences, practicing mindfulness and acceptance, and increasing socialization. The effect occurs in most normal people and even in people with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Biofeedback training, where subjects monitor their own fMRI scans or EEGs, might be an even more effective way for people to train themselves to be happier.

The main point is that people can be as happy as they choose to be.

For more on how positive mood influences memory ability,

see my new book, Memory Power 101 (http://skyhorsepublishing.com).

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[1] Subramaniam, K. and Vinogradov, S. (2013). Improving the neural mechanisms of cognition through the pursuit of happiness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7 August. Doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00452

Working Memory Executive Control

Do you consciously monitor your working memory? That’s the limited-capacity memory you use when looking up a phone number, for example. If you fail to keep the numbers actively in mind while dialing, you may have to look up the number again. In other words, do you check yourself to see if you are still paying attention to what is in your working memory? Is your mind wandering away from what you are trying to hold in working memory? The cure is to deploy your brain’s innate capacity for executive control over working memory.

For more complicated memory chores than dialing a phone number, are you consciously aware of updating what is in your working memory at a given moment with new information? Do you think about being able to recall information you have just received—as when you are reading? Or do you ever willfully suppress what is in your working memory—as for example, expunging an unpleasant thought.

These questions deal with how well you are consciously aware of the likelihood you can recall what you are experiencing. I suspect that most of us exert some conscious executive control over working memory, but not nearly as efficiently as we could or should. Does it matter? Well yes, because controlling what is in your working memory affects the ongoing thought processes that are using the information that is in working memory. Moreover, how well you monitor your working memory affects how well the information registers in your brain and how well it can become consolidated into a more lasting memory.

I explain the consolidation process and ways to enhance it in my book, Memory Power 101.

Executive control of memory is relatively new in memory research, but one group reports studies suggesting that such research will prove fruitful. A year or so ago, this group’s poster presentation at the Society of Neuroscience meeting intrigued me, and I am delighted that the work has now been formally published.

One of their experiments evaluated listeners’ ability to monitor their moment-to-moment working memory storage capacity as new information arrived. As they listened to recorded word lists, experimenters told the subjects to pause the input at the maximum point that would still allow them for perfect real-time memory recall. That is, they pressed a key to pause the input of words in the list at the latest point at which they believe they would have perfect recall. Interestingly, all subjects paused the recording consistent with their known working memory span, as had been determined in pre-experiment testing. In a follow-up experiment, experimenters reduced the sound volume of the word list so that more effort had to be exerted to perform the task. Under these conditions, subjects were much less accurate in matching their listening to their natural working memory capacity and thus their learning was not optimal.

Obviously, such results suggest that making tasks more difficult can degrade thinking and learning. Teachers and professors who speak softly or with foreign accents should take note. Whatever benefit accrues from the challenge to pay better attention under difficult situations is offset by limitations in working memory storage capacity. Examples of degrading influences in addition to sound volume in listening to information include:

Listening is made more difficult by:

·         Extraneous noise

·         Unfamiliar speech accents

·         Speaking too rapidly

·         Speaking too softly

·         Simultaneous presence of visual stimuli that conflict or distract

·         Irritating or distracting mannerisms of the speaker

Reading is made more difficult by:

·         Font and page design selection

·         Convoluted syntax, awkward sentence structure

·         Unfamiliar vocabulary

·         Distracting visuals

·         Wordiness, poor grammar

·         Poor reading technique (tracking with finger movements, random eye fixations, small fixation span (a few letters or one word at a time)

In all situations, an important factor is whether the listener or reader has control over the speed of information presentation. Thinking and learning are compromised if a person has no control over chunking of information input and matching the input to their working memory storage capacity.

Another factor, not considered in this study, is the likelihood that people differ significantly in conscious executive control capability. We know, for example, that some people can hold focus much better than others can, and this certainly affects their ability to optimize working memory storage of information input.

Can working memory executive control be trained? There are already effective training protocols for expanding working memory capacity (as in the number of items you can hold in working memory). I suspect that we will soon see training programs to enhance executive control of working memory.

To summarize, you can optimize thinking and learning by willfully controlling the ease and convenience of information input as well as by how well you have developed a habit of conscious executive control.

Source:

Amichetti, N. M., Stanley, R. S., White, A. G., and Wingfield, A. (2013). Monitoring the capacity of working memory: executive control and effects of listing effort. Mem. Cogn. DOI: 10.3758/s113421-013-0302=0

10 Ways to Make Memory Rehab Work

Physical exercise can rehabilitate bodies that have grown soft and flabby. Can mental exercise rehabilitate brains that have deteriorated because of disease or age? Maybe.

A published scholarly review has examined the research literature on this issue and arrived at several useful conclusions:

1.      Focus, Reduce Distractions. The two common causes of forgetting, in both normal people and those with impaired memory, are a) failure to register new information effectively, and b) interference from conflicting sensations and thoughts.

2.      Customize the Rehabilitation Needed. Rehab need to take into account the type of memory therapy and the cause and severity of the impaired memory capability.

3.      Learn in Small, Frequently Repeated Chunks. New information has to be re-packaged for memory-impaired people so that it is in simple, concrete form, in small chunks, and repeated frequently — with patients required to re-state the information and make explicit associations with what they already know. (Notice how this sounds like the way one needs to teach young children).

4.      Practice Attentiveness. Attentiveness to new information can be enhanced by self-cueing, wherein patients remind themselves to be more attentive at crucial moments. This can even be done by creating a conditioned reflex in which a cue signal conditions greater attentiveness. (Notice how this sounds like how you “clicker” train dogs).

5.      Uses Mnemonics. Mnemonic tips and tricks can help. This includes using acronyms, rhymes, stories, and constructing mental images.

6.      Find Ways to Compensate. Even in patients with severe impairments, some aspects of memory, such as subliminal or implicit memory, may have been spared and can be exploited to compensate for the lost ability.

7.      Spread Rehearsals Over Time. Memory rehearsal is more effective if it is spread out over time rather than bunched into a few closely spaced sessions.

8.      Manipulate the Cues. Be more aware of cues you are using. A “vanishing clues” approach can help. For example, in a rehearsal session, cued retrieval might begin with cueing the first three letters of a target word, then repeating later with two, then  one, and eventually no letter cues.

9.      Minimize Error, Lest you Learn the Errors. Trial-and-error learning is generally less effective than learning conditions that minimize error, because error responses can get stored as memories that compete with the right answers. In short, it is better to not know than to generate wrong answers.

10.  Use Memory Crutches. Using external memory aids (sticky notes, wall charts, notebooks, etc.) should help, bearing in mind, however, that using such aids may themselves be a memory task. It is like having a schedule calendar and forgetting to check the calendar. Smart phones and radio paging devices (“NeuroPage”) can be especially helpful because they remind the patient when to check on the stored information. In some patients, repeated use of such aids develops a habit for target tasks and these may even generalize to certain non-target tasks.

These ten approaches are some of the same approaches that work especially well in people with normal memory capabilities. To make them work in patients with impaired memory just takes more effort, patience, and time.

Source: Ptak, R., Van der Linden, M., and Schneider, A. 2010. Cognitive rehabilitation of episodic memory disorders: from theory to practice. Frontiers in Human Research. 4 (57): 1-11. doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2010.00057.

10 Ways to Slow Mental Decline with Age

Deterioration of the brain usually sneaks up on us. By the time we realize it, it may be too late. As we get older, we more frequently start asking questions like “Where did I put the car keys?” “What was it I was supposed to get at the store?” “What’s your name again?” Most of us have had to ask questions like this, and it seems to happen more often as we get older. We can’t turn back our biological clock, but there are things seniors can do to reduce the rate of their mental decline. The time to act is while you are still relatively young.

 I have made a career out of studying brain and behavioral research literature, and I know some of this research is relevant to everyday memory problems. I have summarized these findings in my new book, Memory Power 101 (298 pages, $14.95, Skyhorse.com), and keep readers up to date with my blog (thankyoubrain.blogspot.com).

As people age, beginning in early middle age, many of them experience a brain deterioration that progresses silently over the next decade or two, sometimes ending in devastating senility. Behaviorally, aging can cause your reflexes to slow. You walk and act slower. You even talk slower. Our memory starts to fail, especially the short-term form of memory ability that is so crucial for learning new things.

Now that bran-scan technology is widely available, physicians have discovered that the brain usually shrinks as people get older. The shrinkage increases the space between the brain surface and the skull. The cavities that hold cerebrospinal fluid get bigger. Nerve tracts in the brain shrivel, even leaving gaping holes in the brain. The “dendritic trees” shrivel, and these have major consequences because dendrites are the parts of neurons that form the contact points, and their loss reduces brain circuitry. You may also lose 40% or more of your dopamine neurons, and that may lead to Parkinson’s disease

For aging individuals, the challenge is to reduce the rate of their decline. This has created a growth anti-aging industry focused on vitamins and supplements, fad diets, gym facilities, mind training programs.  The good news is that some of these things work, if they are begun while people are in early middle age. Given that our country now has so many baby boomers in the over-50 category, it seems useful to summarize some things people can do to prevent or slow memory decline as they age. I particularly like the summary at this site.

Here is an expanded list of things I think are especially important for people entering middle age.

1. Get better organized. Many things we try to remember do not have to be remembered if we get better organized. Car keys, for example, should ONLY be in the car, your pocket/purse, or the same place in your house. Ditto for many other objects, such as purse, hat, glasses, etc. Life is a lot simpler when you have a place for everything, with everything in its place. Habit relieves the memory.

2. Make a special effort to pay attention, concentrate. Research shows that aging reduces a person’s ability to focus and pay attention. This also means that seniors have to work harder at filtering distractions, such as when we open the refrigerator door and forget what we are looking for because we thought of something else before we opened the door. New learning has to be consolidated to form lasting memory, and this takes a little uninterrupted time and conscious rehearsal right after you learn it. Seniors are especially susceptible to having temporary memories wiped out by distractions.

3. Challenge yourself mentally. Seek out new experiences, an active social life, and mental demands such as learning a new language, playing chess, or getting an advanced college degree. Learning new things always has the benefit of making you feel good about yourself, and this is especially true for seniors who accomplish things most people think they can’t do. By the way, there is abundant research literature showing that a lifetime of vigorous learning helps stave off Alzheimer’s disease.

4. Reduce Stress. Acute stress helps you be alert, pay attention better, and increase your chances of remembering what is happening at the time of stress. But chronic stress, whether caused by the same or different stressors, clearly disrupts memory formation and recall. Chronic stress and the hormones it releases can actually kill neurons and shrink the brain (which shrinks with age anyway, and only gets worse with chronic stress).

5. Eat foods with vitamins and anti-oxidants. Make certain you have a balanced diet. Supplements usually won’t help memory unless you have a nutritional deficiency. But even with a good died, adding vitamins C, D, and E can be helpful. Several research studies indicate a memory benefit from eating foods loaded with anti-oxidants. Blueberries (especially on an empty stomach). Another potent anti-oxidant is an ingredient in red wine, resveratrol, but there is no way you could drink enough; however, resveratrol supplements are now on the market. There is also suggestive evidence for memory improvement from omega-3 fatty acids and folic acid. Pharmaceuticals to improve memory are in the works, but you may have to wait quite a while before research shows which ones really work.

6. Don’t get obese, especially in middle age.

Confocal microscopy reveals that every added pound of fat adds approximately one mile of capillary tubing. Obviously, all these added vascular tubing puts a strain on the heart. A diet that produces new fat may well contribute to hardening of the arteries, which in turn compounds the added workload on the heart. People who are obese commonly have high blood pressure and other risk factors involving metabolism.

Obesity is a common cause of diabetes, which adds its own toll on blood vessels and the heart, as well as on nerve cells. No wonder then that obese people may develop mental deterioration. The problem may be worse in women. The more a woman weighs, the worse her memory. No, I am not a chauvinist pig. This claim comes from actual research —by a woman, no less. Diana Kerwin and her colleagues at Northwestern University studied 8,745 ages 65 to 79 and found that for every one-point increase in body mass index, the score on a 100 point memory test dropped by one point.

A likely cause of mental decline in most people is diminished blow flow in small vessels that are easily plugged by cholesterol and lipids or ruptured by high blood pressure. These “mini-strokes” are probably quite common as we age, and though they go undetected, they cause a cumulative damage which progressively affects our behavioral and mental capabilities. Brain cells are among the most metabolically active of all cells: they constantly fire electrical pulses and secrete relatively huge amounts of secretions (neurotransmitters). The brain consumes about 20% of all the body’s oxygen, even though it only ways about 3.5 pounds.

When brain cells do die or are damaged for any reason, healthy neurons are assaulted by inflammatory chemicals, like cytokines, that are released by the brain’s immune cell system. Fat deposits not only stress the heart, they also increase the amount of cytokines, which are hormones that can cause inflammation. Brain inflammation is also commonly caused by infections such as colds and flu and by diets deficient in anti-oxidants.

7. Exercise the body. Though exercise doesn’t do much to cause weight loss unless you are a marathon runner of tennis singles champion, it has many other benefits (improved circulation of blood to the brain, improved levels of HDL cholesterol) that can directly benefit memory and cognitive function. Vigorous aerobic exercise can improve your circulation and perhaps blood flow in the brain. But there also seem to be memory benefits from exercise that is independent of blood circulation. We don’t know why. Maybe relief of stress and improved mood are factors. We know that positive emotions help memory, but for unknown reasons.

8. Exercise the memory. The more you make an effort to memorize, the easier it seems to get. Practice the memorization tricks used by “memory athletes” that I describe in my book. I describe in my book specific image-based systems (“peg systems”) for performing astonishing memory feats, such as card counting, remembering long strings of numbers, and remembering the gist of what is on every page of a magazine or book.

9. Get plenty of sleep. Many studies show the brain is processing the day’s events while you sleep and consolidating them in memory. This kind of “off-line” rehearsal occurs just for the learning experiences on the day of sleep. Naps help too! How’s that for good news?

10. Believe in your brain’s ability to get better. Of course genes and luck have a lot to do with how well one ages mentally. But genes and luck seem to be more common in people who do the nine things mention above. Too many seniors buy into the popular myth that old dogs can’t learn new tricks. They resign themselves to defeatism. But the bottom line is that, unless you have Alzheimer’s disease, you can improve your mental sharpness. Getting older has enough frustrations. Don’t compound them by tolerating mental decline. Enjoy an improved brain. 

New e-book on Better Grades, Less Effort

Better Grades News Release, Sept. 20, 2011
From: Benecton Press

Dr. Bill Klemm, "Memory Medic," has just released a new e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort. The book is available from Smashwords.com IN ALL E-FORMATS for only $2.49 (order from http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/24623). Read the 5-star reviews there. Amazon has it for Kindle.

The book explains the memory tips and tricks he used to become valedictorian, an Honors student in three universities -- including graduating with a D.V.M. degree, and to secure a PhD in two-and-a-half years. He shares what he has learned about student approaches to study over 47 years as a professor. Klemm claims that poor memory is what holds most students back from superior achievement.

Dr. Klemm has priced the book so that every student can afford it. He argues that this book can change a person's life, as his own experience with learning how to learn changed his life. He says, "If you won't invest the cost of a burger in your future, what does that say about your future?"

The ideas in the book are directed to students in high school or college. Parents are urged to explain these ideas to their elementary-school children.

This book is also for any working professional engaged in on-the-job training programs. Dr. Klemm claims It will also help workers master their field and become more competent -- and more likely to be successful.

Memory decline in old age due mostly to distractibility

I just posted a summary of a research paper indicating that a major cause of memory decline in old age is distractibility. This is also another way of saying that the older you get the harder it is to pay attention. Read all about it at my memory research lilnk from my Web site (http://thankyoubrain.com/).  And don't forget to buy the book, in case you haven't already.

 

Bill Klemm

Memory Medic