Lifestyle Effects on Working Memory Ability

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 with health and lifestyle.

The key finding was a strong correlation between activity in working-memory brain areas and health and lifestyle. With all behavior/health variables considered together, the highest positive correlation occurred, in order, with fluid intelligence, reading, spatial orientation, picture vocabulary, several memory tests, and attentiveness.  

They observed an opposite correlation for such specific life-style indicators as large body mass index and a variety of unwise lifestyles such as binge drinking, and regular smoking. Health variables that correlated negatively with working-memory brain areas included high body-mass index, high blood pressure, poor glucose regulation.

The healthy lifestyle variables also correlated with other cognitive functions, such as fluid intelligence, reading/language skills, visuospatial orientation, sustained attention, mental flexibility and emotional intelligence, and physical endurance. Thus, the working memory benefit from healthy lifestyles seems to reflect a general improvement of brain function that good health confers.

The principle confirmed here supports the underlying theme of my recent e-book for seniors, which explained how memory serves a function like a canary in the coal mine. Memory decline is a warning signal of a damaged brain. That book explains the healthy life styles that people should be using as they age in order to keep the brain healthy and prevent memory deterioration. Changing lifestyle after the damage has already occurred may be too late. The point is that young people with healthy lifestyles have better brain function, and those lifestyles will help both body and brain to age well.

I recently published a book, “To Tell the Truth: Save Us from Concealment, Half-truths, Misrepresentation, Spin, and Fake News.” It is an inexpensive ($3.99), e-book now available at Amazon. At Smashwords.com you can choose among several e-book formats, including pdf.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine. https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/496252

Moser, D. A. et al. (2017). An integrated brain-behavior model for working memory. Molecular Psychiatry. Doi: 10.1038/mp.2017.247

Do We See the World Like a Movie?

We have the feeling that we experience the world like a continuously sampled data stream. If we perceive multiple objects of events seemingly at the same time, we may actually be multiplexing the several data streams; that is, we take a sample from one data stream, switch to take a sample from the next stream and so on—all on a millisecond time scale.

But another possibility is that we perceive objects and events like a movie frame, where the brain takes working-memory snapshots and plays them in succession. Like still frames in a movie, if played at a high-enough speed, the frames will blend in our mind to give the illusion of continuous monitoring.

In either case, we have to account for working memory. That is, we can only hold a small amount of information in our working memory at any one instant, as in being able to dial a seven-digit phone number you just looked up. In the phone number case, does our brain accumulate and buffer the representation of each integer until reaching the working memory holding capacity and then report it to consciousness as a set? Or is each integer transferred to consciousness and concantenated until the working memory capacity is filled?

A profound recent model of perception addresses the issue of continuous or movie-like perception, but unfortunately, it did not take working memory into consideration.  The model did address the issue of how consciousness integrates the static and dynamic aspects of the object of attention. For example, when viewing a white and moving baseball, consciousness apparently tracks both the static white color and shape of the ball and its movement at the same time. Are these two visual features bundled together and made available to consciousness on a continual basis or as a batch frame?

A related issue is the so-called flash-lag illusion. Displaying a moving object and a stationary light flash at the same time and location creates the illusion that the flash is lagging. There is some debate over why this happens, but it does argue against continuous monitoring of linked objects.

Another phenomenon that argues against continuous monitoring is the “color phi” phenomenon. Here, if two differently colored disks are shown at two locations in rapid succession, a viewer perceives just one disk that moves from the first location to the second, and the color of the first disk changes along the illusory path of movement. But the viewer cannot know in advance what the color and location of the second disk is. The brain must construct that perception after the fact.

Another way of studying fusion phenomenon is to show two different colored disks in rapid succession at the same location. In this case, an initial red disk followed by a green disk will be perceived as only one yellow disk. A viewer cannot consciously recognize the individual properties if there is not enough time between the two disks. This suggests that information is batched processed unconsciously and later made available to conscious awareness. Transcranial magnetic stimulation can disrupt the fusion, but only for about 400 milliseconds after the first stimulus when presumably the processing is unconscious. Since the presentation of the two disks only takes about 60 msecs, it means that unconscious processing of the fusion takes some 340 milliseconds before the results become available for conscious recognition.

Similar fusion can occur with other sense modalities. For example, the “cutaneous rabbit” effect is a somatosensory fusion illusion in which touch stimulation of first the wrist followed quickly by stimulation near the elbow produces the feeling of touch along the nerve pathway between the two points, as if a rabbit was hopping along the nerve. There is no way for conscious mind to know the pathway without the second touch near the elbow actually occurring. Perception of that pathway information is delayed until the information has been processed unconsciously.

So while these examples argue against continuous conscious monitoring of sensation, they don’t really fit well with the movie-frame idea either. We can distinguish two visual stimuli only 3 msecs apart, but a snapshot model that samples stimuli say every 40 msecs would miss the second stimulus. So to reconcile these conflicting possibilities, the authors advance a two-step model in which sensations are processed unconsciously at high speed, but the conscious percept is reported periodically or is read out when unconscious activity reaches a certain threshold or when there is top-down demand.. This fits the data from others that conscious awareness is delayed after the actual sensory event. For visual stimuli, this delay can be as long as 400 msecs.

Here the question of interest is why sensory awareness might require a mixture of continuous monitoring and periodic reporting of immediately prior data segments. Continuous monitoring and processing permits high-temporal resolution. Snapshot reporting conserves neural resources because information accumulates as a batch (a few bytes) before becoming available to consciousness. The really interesting question is what, if anything, happens to that string of movie-like snapshots that are captured in consciousness. How do these frames affect subsequent unconscious processing in the absence of further sensory input? Can unconscious processes capture and operate on the frames of conscious data? Or can successive frames of conscious data be processed batch wise in consciousness? A useful analogy might be whole-word reading. A beginning reader must sound out each letter in a word, which is comparable to the high-resolution time tracking of sensory input. However, whole word reading allows the more efficient capture of meaning because meaning has been batch pre-processed.

How do these ideas fit with the claim of other scholars that consciousness is just an observer witnessing the movie of life as it occurs? However, this assumption ignores the role that consciousness might have in reasoning, making decisions, and issuing commands. I argue this point elsewhere in my books, Mental Biology, and Making a Scientific Case for Conscious Agency and Free Will.

Research claimed as showing that free will is illusory needs reinterpretation in light of this two-step model of perception. Those experiments typically involved asking a subject to make a simple movement, like press a button, whenever they “freely” want to do so. They are to note when they made the decision by looking at a large, high-resolution clock. At the same time, their brain activity is monitored before, during, and after the chain of events.

The first event is the intention to button press. Intention is a conscious event. Was it preceded by unconscious high-resolution processing? If so, what was the need for high resolution? Or maybe this is just the way the brain is built to operate. The button press decision-making is a slow, deliberative process, which perhaps could be handled consciously as a slow progression of successive frames of conscious thought. Critics may say that there is no such thing as conscious processing, but there is no evidence for such conjecture. Once an intent is consciously realized, the subject is now thinking about when to make the press. This decision may well be determined unconsciously, but again there is no need for high temporal resolution. Moreover, there are intervening conscious steps, where the subject may think to himself, “I just did a press. Shouldn’t I wait? Is there any point in making many presses with short intervals? Or with long intervals? Or with some random mixture? Are each of these questions answered by the two-step model of sensory processing?” However the decision developed, corresponding brain electrical activity is available to be measured.

Then, there is the actual button press, the conscious realization that it has occurred, and the conscious registration of the time on the clock when the subject thought the decision to button press was made. Does the two-step model apply here? If so, there has to be a great deal of timing delays between what actually happened consciously in the brain and what the subject eventually realized the conscious thoughts.

The point is that the two-stage model of perception may have profound implications beyond sensation that involve ideation, reasoning, decision-making, and voluntary behavior. I have corresponded with the lead author to verify that I have a correct understanding of the publication. He said that his group does plan to study the implications for working memory and for free will.

Source:

Herzog, M. H., Kammer, Thomas, and Scharnowski, F. (2017). Time slices: What is the duration of a pecept? PLOS. April 12. Hrp://de.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio/1002433

Confused? Organize Your Information

We all think with ideas and information that we hold in working memory. Working memory is like a scratch pad with a succession of content on the pad that is streamed into the brain's thinking apparatus. What is held on the working memory scratch pad is either retrieved from memory or inserted from real-time experience (like what you are reading or hearing).

Source: W. R. Klemm

So, how does organization apply? As the brain seeks information to put on the scratch pad, it has to know where it is. Thinking is slow at best and possibly incoherent if ideas and information are located in disorganized repositories (such as sticky notes, memos, documents located randomly in different places. How can anyone keep a stream of coherent thought going if there is constant interruption trying to find the note or document one needs at each stage of thinking?

The other thing is that working memory has very limited capacity. Thus, when accessing notes and documents to use in thinking, the content needs to be easily extractable in small chunks. Here is an example that we can all relate to. Congress seems wedded to producing omnibus bills of some 2,000 or more pages. Even if legislators read the entire bills, they couldn't digest the content in any coherent way because the bills are not designed for thinking. No surprise then that we end up with incoherent, ineffective, and even destructive legislation.

Common Sense Methods for Organizing. The underlying principle should be to have a place for everything and put everything in its place. Examples:

• Put important items (bills, car keys, purse, etc.) in their own same place.
• Put sticky note reminders in key places.
• Keep a calendar (but remember to check it each day).
• Get a file cabinet and label the files in the most meaningful ways.
• Have a tote bag or briefcase that always has in it what you need for the day.

Be proactive. If information of a given type accumulates over time, don't wait until the end to organize it. Organize as it goes along. For example, my federal tax information accumulates throughout the year. I don't wait until tax time to organize it. As bills, receipts, and the like come in during the year, I file them in file cabinet folders I have already set up for income tax return preparation. Come April, I can put all the information the tax accountant needs in a matter of a few minutes. And it reduces his time, which lowers my tax preparation bill.

Computer Methods. Computers give us access to enormous amounts of information. But the bad news is that the more information, the greater the need for good organization.

In the case of web-site addresses, most browsers have good systems for bookmarks, but after a couple years of saving bookmarks I find that I have not been sufficiently thoughtful as to how I set up folders and sub-folders.

For other kinds of information, the demand for organizational sophistication varies with the home and workplace workload. Here are a few, free, computer tools:

Tools that Synchronize Across Devices

• One-Note On-line is included in Microsoft Windows. It allows creation of separate notebooks, and labeled "pages" within each notebook that accept separately pasted items that can be dragged about the page.
• Evernote helps you keep all sorts of notes in topic-specific notebooks.
• Google Docs is like Evernote, but is document focused.
• Google Calendar helps you track events, set reminders, import appointments straight from Gmail, and is shareable.
• Remember the Milk is a "to-do" reminder. It has specific apps for the web and multiple portable devices and you can connect it to multiple devices. It syncs with Outlook or Google mail.

Other Tools

• TelePixie sends wake-up calls, reminders, and alerts to your mobile phone.
• Sticky Notes comes with Microsoft Windows and is a computer version of the paper sticky notes you put on the refrigerator, walls, and elsewhere. You can keep the notes open all the time on the computer desktop or temporarily closed.
• Stickies is a much more sophisticated system that runs on Windows. Unlike Sticky Notes which appear all at once on the desktop, Stickies notes are separately attached only to whatever document you are working on.
• Flashcards provides a simple way to create flashcards with the information you are trying to learn and drill yourself to help make it stick in your mind.
• WiseMapping is a mind mapping tool that provides you with an awesome way to keep notes in an organized fashion. Items in the map can have attached text commentary. Maps can be shared and exported in multiple formats.

Readers wanting to know more about how the brain works may be interested in Dr. Bill's recent book, Mental Biology (Prometheus).

Decision-making 401

In the previous post, Decision-making 101, I provided evidence that selective attention to items that were retrieved into working memory were a major factor in making good decisions. This has generally unrecognized educational significance. Rarely is instructional material packaged with foreknowledge of how it can be optimized in terms of reducing the working memory cognitive load. New research from a cognitive neuroscience group in the U.K. is demonstrating the particular importance this has for learning how to correctly categorize new learning material. They show that learning is more effective when the instruction is optimized ("idealized" in their terminology).

Decisions often require categorizing novel stimuli, such as normal/abnormal, friend/foe, helpful/harmful, right/wrong or even assignment to one of multiple category options. Teaching students how to make correct category assignments is typically based on showing them examples for each category. Categorization issues routinely arise when learning is tested. For example, the common multiple-choice testing in schools requires that a decision be made on each potential answer as right or wrong.

In reviewing the literature on optimizing training, these investigators found reports that one approach that works is to present training in a specific order. For example, in teaching students how to classify by category, people perform better when a number of examples from one category are presented together followed by a number of contrasting examples from the other category. Other ordering manipulations are learned better if simple, unambiguous cases in either category are presented together early in training, while the harder, more confusing cases are presented afterwards. Such training strengthens the contrast between the two categories.

The British group has focused on the role of working memory in learning. Their idea is that ambiguity during learning is a problem. In real-world situations that require correct category identification, naturally occurring ambiguities make correct decisions difficult. Think of these ambiguities as cognitive "noise" that interferes with the training that is recalled into working memory. This noise clutters the encoding during learning and clutters the thinking process and impairs the rigorous thought processes that may be needed to make a correct distinction. In the real world of youngsters in school, other major cognitive noise sources are the task-irrelevant stimuli that come from multi-tasking habits so common in today's students.

The theory is that when performing a learned task, the student recalls what has been taught into working memory. Working memory has very limited capacity, so any "noise" associated with the initial learning may be incompletely encoded and the remembered noise may also complicate the thinking required to perform correctly. Thus, simplifying learning material should reduce remembered ambiguities, lower the working memory load, and enable better reasoning and test performance.

One example of optimizing learning is the study by Hornsby and Love (2014) who applied the concept to training people with no prior medical training to decide whether a given mammogram was normal or cancerous. They hypothesized that learning would be more efficient if students were trained on mammograms that were easily identified as normal or cancerous, and did not include examples where the distinction was not so obvious. The underlying premise is that decision-making involves recalling past remembered examples into working memory and accumulating the evidence for the appropriate category.  If the remembered items are noisy (i.e. ambiguous) the noise also accumulates and makes the decision more difficult. Thus, learners will have more difficulty if they are trained on examples across the whole range of possibilities from clearly evident to obscure than if they were separately trained on examples that were clearly evident as belong into one category or another.

Initially a group of learners was trained on a full-range mixture of mammograms so the images could be classified by diagnostic difficulty as easy or hard or in between. On each trial, three mammograms were shown: the left image was normal, the right was cancerous, and the middle was the test item requiring a diagnosis of whether it was normal or cancerous.

In the actual experiment, one student group was trained to classify a representative set of easy, medium, and hard images, while the other group was trained only on easy samples. During training trials, learners looked at the three mammograms, stated their diagnosis for the middle image, and were then given feedback as to whether they were right or wrong. After completing all 324 training trials, participants completed 18 test trials, which consisted of three previously unseen easy, medium and hard items from each category displayed in a random order. Test trials followed the same procedure as training trials.

When both groups were tested on samples across the range in both conditions, the optimized group was better able to distinguish normal from cancerous mammograms in both the easy and medium images. Note that the optimized group was not trained on medium images. However, no advantage was found in the case of hard test items; both groups made many errors on the hard cases, and optimized training yielded poorer results than regular training. 

We need to explain why this strategy does not seem to work on hard cases. I suspect that in easy and medium cases, not much understanding is required. It is just a matter of pattern recognition, made easier because the training was more straightforward and less ambiguous. The learner is just making casual visual associations. For hard cases, a learner must know and understand the criteria needed to make distinctions. The subtle differences go unrealized if diagnostic criteria are not made explicit in the training. In actual medical practice, many mammograms actually cannot be distinguished by visual inspection—they really are hard. Other diagnostic tests are needed.

The basic premise of such research is that learning objects or task should be pared down to the basics, eliminating extraneous and ambiguous information, which constitute “noise” that confounds the ability to make correct categorizations.

In common learning situations, a major source of noise is extraneous information, such as marginally relevant detail. Reducing this noise is achieved by focus on the underlying principle. Actually I stumbled on this basic premise of simplification over 50 years ago when I was a student trying to optimize my own learning. What I realized was the importance of homing in on the basic principle of what I was trying to learn from instructional material. If I understood a principle, I could use that understanding to think through to many of the implications and applications.

In other words, the principle is: "don't memorize any more than you have to." Use the principles as a way to figure out what was not memorized. Once core principles are understood, much of the basic information can be deduced or easily learned. This is akin to the standard practice of moving from the general to the specific. Even so, general ideas should emphasize principles.

Textbooks are sometimes quite poor in this regard. Too many texts have so much ancillary information in them that they should be thought of as reference books. That is why I have found a good market for my college-level neuroscience electronic textbook, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience,” in which each 2-3 page chapter is based entirely on each of the 75 core principles that cover the broad span of membrane biochemistry to human cognition.. A typical neuroscience textbook by other authors can run up to 1,500 pages.

Source:

Hornsby, Adam, and Love, B. C. (2014). Improved classification of mammograms following idealized training. J. Appl. Res. Memory and Cognition. 3(2):72-76.

Dr. Klemm is a Senior Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M. His latest books are Memory Power 101, (Skyhorse) and Mental Biology (Prometheus). He also writes learning and memory blogs for Psychology Today magazine and his own site at thankyoubrain.blogspot.com. His posts have nearly 1.5 million reader views.

Decision-making 101

Teenagers are notorious for poor decision-making. Of course that is inevitable, given that their brains are still developing, and they have had relatively little life experience to show them how to predict what works and what doesn’t. Unfortunately, what doesn’t work may have more emotional appeal, and most of us at any age are more susceptible to our emotions than cold, hard logic.

Seniors also are prone to poor decision-making if senility has set it. Unscrupulous people take advantage of such seniors because a brain that is deteriorating has a hard time making wise decisions.

In between teenage and senility is when the brain is at its peak for good decision making. Wisdom comes with age, up to a point. Some Eastern cultures venerate their old people as generally being especially wise. After all, it you live long enough, and are still mentally healthy, you ought to make good decisions because you have a lifetime of experience to teach you what future choices are likely to work and which are not.

Much of that knowledge comes from learning from one’s mistakes. On the other hand, some people, regardless of age, can’t seem to learn from their mistakes. Most of the time the problem is not stupidity but a flawed habitual process by which one is motivated to make wise decisions and evaluate options. Best of all is learning from somebody else’s mistakes, so you don’t have to make them yourself.

Learning from your mistakes can be negative, if you fret about it. Learning what you can do to avoid repeating a mistake is one thing, but dwelling on it erodes one’s confidence and sense of self worth. I can never forget the good advice I read from, of all people, T. Boone Pickens. He was quoted in an interview as saying that he was able to re-make his fortune on multiple occasions because he didn’t dwell on losing the fortunes. He credited that attitude to his college basketball coach who told the team after each defeat, “Learn from your mistakes, but don’t dwell on them. Learn from what you did right and do more of that.”

It would help if we knew how the brain made decisions, so we could train it to operate better. “Decision neuroscience” is an emerging field of study aimed at how learning how brains make decisions and how to optimize the process. Neuroscientists seemed to have honed in on two theories, both of which deal with how the brain handles the processing of alternate options to arrive at a decision.

One theory is that each option is processed in its own competing pool of neurons. As processing evolves, the activity in each pool builds up and down as each pool competes for dominance. At some point, activity builds up in one of the pools to reach a threshold, in winner-take-all fashion, to allow the activity in that pool to dominate and issue the appropriate decision commands to the parts of the brain needed for execution. As one possible example, two or more pools of neurons separately receive input that reflects the representation of different options. Each pool sends an output to another set of neurons that feed back either excitatory or inhibitory influences, thus providing a way for competition among pools to select the pool that eventually dominates because it has built up more impulse activity than the others.

The other theory is based on guided gating wherein input to pools of decision-making neurons is gated to regulate how much excitatory influence can accumulate in each given pool. [i] The specific routing paths involve inhibitory neurons that shut down certain routes, thus preferentially routing input to a preferred accumulating circuit. The route is biased by estimated salience of each option, current emotional state, memories of past learning, and the expected reward value for the outcome of each option.

These decision-making possibilities involve what is called “integrate and fire.” That is, input to all relevant pools of neurons accumulates and leads to various levels of firing in each pool. The pool firing the most is most likely to dominate the output, that is, the decision.

However circuits make decisions, there is considerable evidence that nerve impulse representations for each given choice option simultaneously code for expected outcome and reward value. These value estimates update on the fly.[ii] Networks containing these representations compete to arrive at a decision.

Any choice among alternative options is affected by how much information for each option the brain has to work on. When the brain is consciously trying to make a decision, this often means how much relevant information the brain can hold in working memory. Working memory is notoriously low-capacity, so the key becomes remembering the sub-sets of information that are the most relevant to each option. Humans think with what is in their working memory. Experiments have shown that older people are more likely to hold the most useful information in working memory, and therefore they can think more effectively. The National Institute of Aging began funding decision-making research in 2010 at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity. Results of their research are showing that older people often make better decisions than younger people.

As one example, older people are more likely to make rational cost-benefit analyses. Older people are more likely to recognize when they have made a bad investment and walk away rather than throwing more good money after bad.

A key factor seems to be that older people are more selective about what they remember. For example, one study from the Stanford Center compared the ability of young and old people to remember a list of words. Not surprisingly, younger people remembered more words, but when words were assigned a number value, with some words being more valuable than others, older people were better at remembering high-value words and ignoring low-value words. It seems that older people selectively remember what is important, which should make it easier to make better decisions.

Decision-making skills are important of learning achievement in school. Students need to know how to focus in general, and focus on what is most relevant in particular. They are not learning that skill, and their multi-tasking culture is teaching them many bad habits.

Those of us who care deeply about educational development of youngsters need to push our schools to address the thinking and learning skills of students. "Teaching to the test" detracts from time spent in teaching what matters most. Today's culture of multi-tasking is making matters worse. Children don't learn how to attend selectively and intensely to the most relevant information, because they are distracted by superficial attention to everything. Despite their daily use of Apple computers and smart phones, only one college student out of 85 could draw the Apple logo correctly.[iii]

Memory training is generally absent from teacher training programs. Despite my locally well-publicized experience in memory training, no one in the College of Education at my university has ever asked me to share my knowledge with their faculty or with pre-service teachers. The paradox is that teachers are trained to help students remember curricular answers for high-stakes tests. What could be more important than learning how to decide what to remember and how to remember it? And we wonder why student performance is so poor?

"Memory Medic" is author of Memory Power 101 (Skyhorse) and Better Grades, Less Effort (Benecton).

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[i]Purcell, B. A.; Heitz, R. P.; Cohen, J. Y.; Schall, et al. (2010). Neurally constrained modeling of perceptual decision making. Psychological Review, 117(4), 1113-1143.

[ii] McCoy, A. N., and Platt, M. L. (2005). Expectations and outcomes: decision-making in the primate brain. J. Comp. Physiol A 191, 201-211.

[iii] Blake, Adam B., Nazarian, Meenely, and Castel, Alan D. (2015). The Apple of the mind's eye: Everyday attention, metamemory, and reconstructive memory for the Apple logo. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 2015; 1 DOI: 10.1080/17470218.2014.1002798

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

Memorization Is Not a Dirty Word

School is ending for the year, and students surely welcome the break. But they will do well to think on how they learn to learn so that next Fall they can be more successful with less effort. Interesting how that reminds me of my e-book for students, Better Grades, Less Effort.

In my experience with students, both the college students I teach and the secondary students that teachers tell me about, the biggest weakness students have is that they either try to remember school material by rote memorization or have no strategy at all, relying on some kind of magical mental osmosis.

 Even among students who rely on rote memory, they generally lack much of a strategy for memorizing, relying on varying degrees of casual “looking over” the instructional material until they think they can remember it. Experiments show that students routinely over-estimate how much they remember and under-estimate the value of further study. Moreover, many educators at all levels have disdain for memorization, stating that we should focus education on teaching students to think and solve problems, as if you can think and solve problems without knowing anything. Too many teachers regard memorizing as old-fashioned and even destructive of enlightenment.

Disdain for memorization is a relatively new phenomenon in education. In ancient times, people took great pains and pride in memorizing huge quantities of information. The advent of printing greatly reduced the need to memorize history and cultural mores. In modern times, we have the Internet, where you can just Google what you need to know. So who needs to get brain-strain trying to remember things?

Now we have a book by Samuel Arbesman, The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date, where he argues that there are no lasting facts. They all have a half life, that is, the number of years it takes to falsify half of what you think are facts. He argues that new “facts” are made all the time, often replacing what we had previously thought were facts. He argues we should just stop memorizing and look up whatever current facts we need on the Internet. But if there are no lasting facts, how are those you find on Google any more valid than those you memorize and can deploy in real time.

There are some serious errors in Arbesman’s position.

1.      Many facts are immutable; that is, they don’t have a half-life. Events in history did actually occur, and while revisionist writers of school history textbooks may change the reporting of those events, the facts remain true. Nixon covered up Watergate, Obama obfuscated Benghazi. The fact of DNA as a basis for heredity is not likely to change.

2.      Many facts that do change will not change in a given person’s lifetime and thus will be useful in daily living.

3.      The Internet is flooded with error, propaganda, and un-vetted assertions.

4.      You don’t always have Internet access.

5.      In many situations, it is not practical to look up what you need. Ever try to read or speak a foreign language where you have to look up most of the words? Ever try to use computer software where you have to repeatedly refer to the instruction manual?

6.      Expertise in any field of endeavor requires a great deal of memorized “facts.” And if you want to succeed in life, it pays to be an expert.

I can easily make a strong case for memorization, especially for schools. Here is a list supporting the importance of memorizing:

1.      Memorized information is always with you, even when you lack the time or access to sources where you could look it up.

2.      We think and solve problems with what is in working memory, which in turn is memory of currently available information or recall of previously memorized  information. The process of thinking is like streaming video on the Internet: information flows in as short frames onto the virtual scratch pad of working memory, successively replaced by new chunks of information from real-time or recalled memory. Numerous studies show that the amount of information you can hold in working memory is tightly correlated with IQ and problem-solving ability.

We think by shuttling small batches of information as we experience it or from memory onto a  virtual  scratchpad called working memory. These batches are shuttled  sequentially into our  processing networks ("thought engine"). How well we think depends on what is on the scratch pad. From Klemm, 2011. Atoms of Mind, Springer.

3.      Memorization provides exercise for the mind. This is the reason schools used to require students to memorize poems, Bible verses, famous speeches, etc. The true advantage of such exercise is that generates mental industriousness. Any teacher will tell you that many students today are mentally lazy. Memorization also trains the mind to pay attention and focus intensely. Such skill also seems to be lacking in many youngsters, which is most obvious in the growing number of kids diagnosed with ADHD.

4.      Memorization trains the brain to develop learning and memory schemas that facilitate future learning. Learning schemas develop as you acquire competence in an area—call it skill A. Now, when you need to learn a new and related skill, B, you mind says to itself, “I don’t know how to do B. But I do know how to do A, and some of that can be applied to learning B.” Memory schemas are memorized frames of reference and association, where having memorized fact A, you have an association handle for memorizing fact B.

5.      If you learn strategies for memorization, as opposed to the rote memory approach of looking information over repeatedly, you accelerate the ease, speed, and reliability of learning new things.

Bottom line: the more you know, the more you can know!

Regardless of where you stand on the importance of memory, most people believe that learning is a good thing. But what good is learning if you don’t remember it?

If you are convinced that you or your loved ones could benefit from better memory, many ways to do it are explained in my books, Better Grades, Less Effort (e-book for students) and Memory Power 101 (paperback from SkyhorsePublishing.com). 

Five Reasons Memorization Matters

In ancient times the ability to memorize was a prized skill. Whole cultures were passed down through the centuries by those who remembered the stories, legends, history, and taboos and laws. The advent of the printing press launched a new era of “looking things up.” Today, the Internet and its search engines may seem to be making memorization irrelevant in the modern world. What we don’t remember, we think we can always look up.

Schools have generally abandoned requiring students to memorize poems, famous speeches, multiplication tables, and all sorts of academic material that used to be ingrained in the curriculum. A growing disdain for memorization emerged among the other intellectually damaging effects of post-modernism. Now the emphasis in education is on new math, critical thinking, inquiry learning, “hands-on” activity, and the like. There is nothing wrong with these new emphases, except that they come at the expense of children learning the mental discipline of memorization. Teachers and professors I know agree with me that today’s school children, in general, are more mentally lazy than those in the past. The one inarguable effect of honing memorization skills is that the mentally lazy can’t succeed at it.

Here are five reasons that we should all strive to improve our ability to remember:

1. Memorization is discipline for the mind—much needed in an age when so many minds are lazy, distracted, have little to think about, or think sloppily. Memorization helps train the mind to focus and be industrious.

2. No, you can’t always “Google it.” Sometimes you don’t have access to the Internet. Not everything of importance is on the web (and a great deal of irrelevant trash will accompany any search). Nor is looking up material helpful under such situations as when you learn to use a foreign language, must write or speak extemporaneously, or wish to be an expert.

3. Memorization creates the repertoire of what we think about. Nobody can think in a vacuum of information. To be an expert in any field requires knowledge that you already have.

4. We think with the ideas held in working memory, which can only be accessed at high speed from the brain’s stored memory. Understanding is nourished by the information you hold in working memory as you think. Without such knowledge, we have a mind full of mush.

5. The exercise of the memory develops learning and memory schema that promote improved ability to learn. The more you remember, the more you can learn.

History documents that great minds are filled with knowledge. Jesus had to know scripture in order to show Pharisees what was wrong with their practice of it. Picasso had to know how to paint before he decided what to paint. Einstein had to know the physics literature of his day before he could realize its errors. Warren Buffett makes tons of money because he knows what he is doing.

If you want real educational reform, go back to the fundamentals that worked in the past. What we are doing in education today is not working!

And what are the fundamentals of developing learning and memory skills? 

Join this site and peruse its archives. 

Check out my books (Better Grades, Less Effort and Memory Power 101). 

Training Working Memory

Working memory refers to the memory you can consciously hold in your mind at any one instant — such as a phone number you just looked up. Most people can only hold about four totally independent items in their working memory.

Working memory relates to intelligence. The reason is that thinking involves streaming into the brain’s “thought engine” chunks of information held in working memory. The working memory streams in, much like a Web video streams into your computer. The more you can hold in working memory, the more information the brain has to think with — that is, the smarter it can be.

IQ is not fixed. It improves dramatically in the early school years in all children. Moreover, a recent study shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ can change (for better or worse) in teenagers.

Educators have known for some time that it is possible to train ADHD children to have better working memories, and in the process improve their school performance. The idea that working memory capacity might be expanded by training normal children has not yet caught on. Test-driven teaching in U.S. schools teaches students what to learn, not how to learn.

Researchers in Japan recently tested whether a simple working memory training method could increase the working memory capacity of children. While they were at it, they tested for any effect on IQ. Children ages 6-8 were trained 10 minutes a day each day for two months. The training task to expand working memory capacity consisted of presenting a digit or a word item for a second, with one-second intervals between items. For example, a sequence might be 5, 8, 4, 7, with one-second intervals between each digit. Test for recall could take the form of "Where in the sequence was the 4?" or "What was the 3rd item?" Thus students had to practice holding the item sequence in working memory. With practice, the trainers increased the number of items from 3 to 8.

After training, researchers tested the children on another working memory task. Scores on this test indicated in all children that working memory correlated with IQ test scores. When first graders were tested for intelligence, the data showed that intelligence scores increased during the year by 6% in controls, but increased by 9% in the group that had been given the memory training. The memory training effect was even more evident in the second graders, with a 12% gain in intelligence score in the memory trained group, compared with a 6% gain in controls. As might be expected, the lower IQ children showed the greatest gain from memory training.

I recently found a paper revealing lasting improvements in brain function were produced in healthy adults by only five weeks of practice on three working-memory tasks involving the location of objects in space, using a training program called CogMed. Similar results have been reported by other investigators.

Another study provides strong evidence that increasing adult working memory capacity will raise their IQ. Subjects, young adults were trained on a so-called dual N-back test in which subjects were asked to recall a visual stimulus that they saw two, three or more stimulus presentations in the past. As performance improved with each block of trials, the task demands were increased by shifting from two-back to three, then three to four, etc. Daily training took about 25 minutes.

The investigators found working memory training improved scores on the IQ test. Moreover, the effect was dose-dependent, in that intelligence scores increased in a steady straight-line fashion as the number of training sessions increased from 8 to 12 to 17 to 19.

Advances in this arena of raising IQ in teenagers and adults may come faster now that we have some many published reports that working memory capacity can indeed be expanded by training. The trick is in finding which approaches work best. Currently, we believe that working memory can be expanded by attentiveness training, music, and certain game environments. Actually, I believe demanding education can do the same thing.

Various techniques are reported in the research literature, and the best results seem to come from n-back methods. One study by Verhaeghen and colleagues show that memory span could be increased from one to four steps back with 10 hours (1 hr/session) of N-back training.

A whole cognitive enhancement industry is flourishing. The idea of brain fitness software is that playing mentally challenging games will make you smarter. This is not necessarily true. Several recent reviews suggest that such games do little. I can only recommend with some certainty those games that focus on expanding working memory capacity, and even here, one should not expect too much. I know about three such programs, MindSparke, Cogmed, and Jungle Memory. I have no personal experience or financial interest in any of these, but each has the potential to be helpful, especially in kids or adults with attention deficit.

Training Working Memory Can Be Fun

Biological reward comes from the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Dopamine release is promoted by performing working memory tasks, which suggests that working memory tasks are actually rewarding. In the study of human subjects by Fiona McNab and colleagues in Stockholm, human males (age 20-28) were trained for 35 minutes per day for five weeks on working memory tasks with a difficulty level close to their individual capacity limit. After such training, all subjects showed increased working memory capacity. Functional MRI scans also showed that the memory training increased the cerebral cortex density of dopamine D1 receptors, the receptor subtype that mediates feelings of euphoria and reward.

Some games that are fun to play may also help working memory. The most obvious example is chess. To play chess well, you have to learn to expand working memory capacity to hold a plan for several offensive moves while at the same time holding a memory of how the opponent could respond to each of the moves. Not surprisingly there are studies showing that IQ scores can go up after several months of chess playing. Some schools, especially in minority schools in impoverished neighborhoods have seen marked improvements in school work by students who joined school chess clubs.

Students who make good grades feel good about their success. Likewise, people who are "life-long learners" have discovered learning lots of new things makes them feel good.

For numerous ideas on how to be a more effective learner, don’t forget to check out my inexpensive e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, available in all formats from Smashwords.com.

Soucres:

http://www.onlinecollegecourses.com/2012/03/25/10-big-brain-benefits-of-playing-chess/

Alloway, T. P. & Alloway, R. G. (2008). Jungle Memory Training Program (Memosyne Ltd, UK).

Alloway, T. P. & Alloway, R. G. (2009). The efficacy of working memory training in improving crystallized intelligence.  Nature Precedings. Htl: 1010/npre.2009.3697.1

McNab, F. et al. (2009). Changes in cortical dopamine D1 receptor binding associated with cognitive training. Science. 323: 800-802.

Verhaeghen, P., Cerella, J., and Basak, C. (2004). A working memory workout: how to expand the focus of serial attention from one to four items in 10 hours or less. J. Exp. Psychol, Learning, Memory and Cognition. 30 (6): 1322-1337.

Increase Working Memory and Increase IQ

A key research report on working memory was summarized in a recent guest column in the New York Times by Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt. Below is a summary of what they said in the article:

J. R. Flynn first noted that standardized intelligence quotient (I.Q.) scores were rising by three points per decade in many countries, and even faster in some countries like the Netherlands and Israel. For instance, in verbal and performance I.Q., an average Dutch 14-year-old in 1982 scored 20 points higher than the average person of the same age in his parents’ generation in 1952. These I.Q. increases over a single generation suggest that the environmental conditions for developing brains have become more favorable in some way.

What might be changing? One strong candidate is working memory, defined as the ability to hold information in mind while manipulating it to achieve a cognitive goal. Examples include remembering a clause while figuring out how it relates the rest of a sentence, or keeping track of the solutions you’ve already tried while solving a puzzle. Flynn has pointed out that modern times have increasingly rewarded complex and abstract reasoning. Differences in working memory capacity account for 50 to 70 percent of individual differences in fluid intelligence (abstract reasoning ability) in various meta-analyses, suggesting that it is one of the major building blocks of I.Q. (2-4). This idea is intriguing because working memory can be improved by training.

A common way to measure working memory is called the "n-back" task. Presented with a sequential series of items, the person taking the test has to report when the current item is identical to the item that was presented a certain number (n) of items ago in the series. For example, the test taker might see a sequence of letters like

L K L R K H H N T T N X

presented one at a time. If the test is an easy 1-back task, she should press a button when she sees the second H and the second T. For a 3-back task, the right answers are K and N, since they are identical to items three places before them in the list. Most people find the 3-back condition to be challenging.

A recent paper reported (5) that training on a particularly fiendish version of the n-back task improves I.Q. scores. Instead of seeing a single series of items like the one above, test-takers saw two different sequences, one of single letters and one of spatial locations. They had to report n-back repetitions of both letters and locations, a task that required them to simultaneously keep track of both sequences. As the trainees got better, n was increased to make the task harder. If their performance dropped, the task was made easier until they recovered.

Each day, test-takers trained for 25 minutes. On the first day, the average participant could handle the 3-back condition. By the 19th day, average performance reached the 5-back level, and participants showed a four-point gain in their I.Q. scores.

The I.Q. improvement was larger in people who’d had more days of practice, suggesting that the effect was a direct result of training. People benefited across the board, regardless of their starting levels of working memory or I.Q. scores (though the results hint that those with lower I.Q.s may have shown larger gains). Simply practicing an I.Q. test can lead to some improvement on the test (6), but control subjects who took the same two I.Q. tests without training improved only slightly.

Since the gains accumulated over a period of weeks, training is likely to have drawn upon brain mechanisms for learning that can potentially outlast the training. But this is not certain. If continual practice is necessary to maintain I.Q. gains, then this finding looks like a laboratory curiosity. But if the gains last for months (or longer), working memory training may become as popular as and more effective than games like sudoku among people who worry about maintaining their cognitive abilities.

Now, some caveats. The results, though tantalizing, are not perfect. It would have been better to give the control group some other training not related to working memory, to show that the hard work of training did not simply motivate the experimental group to try harder on the second I.Q. test. The researchers did not test whether working memory training improved problem-solving tasks of the type that might occur in real life. Finally, they did not explore how much improvement would be seen with further training.

Sources:

1. Flynn, J. R. 1987. Massive IQ gains in 14 nations: What IQ tests really measure. Psych. Bull. 101 (2) 171-191.

2. P.L. Ackerman (1987) Individual differences in skill learning: An integration of psychometric and information processing perspectives. Psychological Bulletin 102:3–27.

3. M.J. Kane, D.Z. Hambrick, and A.R.A. Conway (2005) Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are strongly related constructs: comment on Ackerman, Beier, and Boyle (2005). Psychological Bulletin 131:66–71.

4. H.-M. Süss, K. Oberauer, W.W. Wittmann, O. Wilhelm, and R. Schulze (2002) Working-memory capacity explains reasoning ability—and a little bit more. Intelligence 30:261–288.

5. S.M. Jaeggi, M. Buschkuehl, J. Jonides, and W.J. Perrig (2008) Improving fluid intelligence with training on working memory. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 105:6829-6833.

6. D.A. Bors, F. Vigneau (2003) The effect of practice on Raven’s Advanced Progressive Matrices. Learning and Individual Differences 13:291–312.

Training Working Memory May Be Rewarding

Biological reward comes from the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Performing working memory tasks promotes dopamine release. In the study of human subjects by Fiona McNab and colleagues in Stockholm, human males (age 20-28) were trained on working memory tasks with a difficulty level close to their individual capacity limit for 35 minutes per day for 5 weeks. After such training, all subjects showed increased working memory capacity. Functional MRI scans also showed that the memory training increased the cerebral cortex density of dopamine D1 receptors, the receptor subtype that mediates feelings of euphoria and reward.

Students who make good grades feel good about their success. Likewise, people who are "life-long learners" have discovered that learning lots of new things makes them feel good. Though this present study did not rigorously test the idea, it is possible that learning how to improve your working memory capacity can also make you feel good.

Source: McNab, F. et al. 2009. Changes in cortical dopamine D1 receptor binding associated with cognitive training. Science. 323: 800-802.

Reading comprehension: role of eye movements

The capacity of working memory, for example the number of digits in a phone number you can hold long enough to dial it, determines how well you can think and the ability to form lasting memory. I have explained this in my book, Thank You Brain For All You Remember. New insight into working memory capacity has recently been reported by Paul Bays and Masud Husain in a research report in Science. They studied the capacity for visual memory, that is, the number of visual objects a person can hold in working memory. In the study, the emphasis was on the role played by eye fixation.

The design was to display four geometric shapes on a screen, each with a different color. The subjects viewed the screen without moving their eyes, and then the screen was blanked. Next, one of the items was redisplayed, but in a different location and rotation. The working memory task was to remember the original orientation and location. The objects were then withdrawn. Typically, subjects recalled well as long as the set size was no larger than four and as long as the probe object was not changed much. But precision of recall fell off drastically, even with only two or three objects, if the probe object was moved significantly.

Next, they wanted to explore the effects of moving the eyes across the stimulus field. Actually, this presents a major challenge to the brain, because more information has to be held in working memory. Even so, the results when eye movement was allowed and when it was not seemed about the same. The decline in accuracy depended mostly on the number of objects in the set. This suggests that the brain parcels out the task so that memory resources are assigned proportionately to each item. But eye movements are important. In another study, subjects made a series of eye movements to fixate on each item in a five-set display, and the screen was blanked just before the fifth item was fixated. Then subjects were tested to report the location and orientation of the objects. Accuracy was greatest for the fifth item, presumably because the brain had allocated more of its memory resources to registering the item the eyes were about to fixate. This, of course, is being done at the expense of remembering all of the previous four fixations.

These facts must have profound implications for reading comprehension. Certainly, these data seem to support the value of “whole reading” theory, which emphasizes fixing eyes on whole words, preferably where one eye fixation takes in several words.^* The point is that if brain allocates more of its memory resources to each upcoming eye fixation, then reducing the number of fixations ought to increase comprehension, as indicated by working memory of what is seen with each fixation. In other words, the brain can process the meaning of multiple words in an upcoming fixation because the brain is devoting more memory resources to the next fixation task.

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^*This is not to denigrate phonics, for there is compelling evidence that phonics is the best way to learn words in the first place. But once learned, remembering the words you read is probably best achieved by reducing the number of eye fixations.

Source:

Bays, P. M., and Husain, M. 2008. Dynamic shifts of limited working memory resources in human vision. Science. 321: 851-85