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). 

Why Kids Don't Do Homework

Reader Marcia Hall just posted an excellent summary, "6 Reasons Your Child Refuses to Do Homework."  I urge all parents of school-age children to read this.

Homework makes a critical contribution to effective learning. First, it imposes memory rehearsal soon after new learning is presented. This promotes consolidation into long-term memory. Second, homework causes students to think about new learning, and thinking itself is the best form of memory rehearsal.

Unfortunately, too many teachers make homework "drill and kill." To be most effective, homework should require students to think about the learning in new ways and contexts. For example, if they learn some history facts during the day, the homework needs to require them to make an application of those facts, such as relating it to lessons for today's world or evaluating the history to preceding events or those that followed later.

Another kind of homework that is useful is as preparation for what is going to be presented soon in class. This use of homework can help stimulate interest. In any case, it gives students some factual background that will help them get more out of what will be covered in class.

If you or the teachers disapprove of homework, please re-think your position. Homework of the right kind is a time-tested major contributor to learning.

What Happens to Aging Brain

Deterioration of the brain sneaks up on most of us. The first clue might be hearing loss, especially in the higher frequencies. We may be forced into bifocals, even trifocals. But the most serious signs of deterioration occur in the brain.

As we age, our reflexes slow. We walk and act slower. We even talk slower. Our memory starts to fail, especially the short-term form of memory ability that is so crucial for learning new things.

Brain-scan technology reveals aging can cause the brain to shrink. Nerve tracts in the brain shrivel, making the cerebrospinal fluid cavities larger and even leaving gaping holes in the brain. Shriveling occurs in the neuron terminal branches that form the contact points among neurons. People may lose 40% or more of dopamine neurons causing Parkinson’s disease.

These are brutal truths. Whole societies are being affected in major economic and social ways in countries where the population is aging rapidly, such as Japan (23% over 65), Germany (20.5%), Italy (20.4%), and the U.S. (13%). The countries that show that fastest rate of change in population age, in order, are Iran, Vietnam, Mexico, India, and South Korea. The obvious consequences are a shrinking labor force and shifting of a nation’s wealth to health care.

The challenge for aging individuals 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, and books like my books on memory.  The good news is that these things can work, if they are begun while people are in early middle age.

A likely cause of mental decline in most people is diminished blow flow in small vessels that are easily plugged by cholesterol and fats or ruptured by high blood pressure. These undetected “mini-strokes” are probably quite common as we age, yet they cause cumulative, progressive damage. Another source of damage is the lifetime cumulative effect of oxidative free radicals that result from energy metabolism. 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. Brain inflammation is commonly caused by infections such as colds and flu and by diets deficient in anti-oxidants.

We now know brain function need not decline with age, at least for people who stay healthy and mentally active. By the way, research shows that a lifetime of vigorous learning helps prevent or delay Alzheimer’s disease.

Level of education and lifetime of intellectual stimulus of research seem to protect brain against aging.  Here are some examples:

• Leo Tolstoy learned to ride a bicycle at 67
• Queen Victoria began learning Hindustani at 68
• Giuseppe Verdi was still composing operas in his 80s
• Somerset Maugham wrote his last book at 84
• Frank Lloyd Wright designed his last building at 89
• In their 90s, Robert Frost was writing poems and George Bernard Shaw was writing plays, Georgia O’Keefe was painting pictures, and Pablo Casals was playing cello
• Oliver Wendell Holmes was still dominating the Supreme Court until he retired at 91
• Linus Pauling was actively publishing just before his death at age 93.
• Leopold Stokowski recorded 20 albums in his 90s and signed a six-year contract at 96.

Scientists are particularly noted for being sharp and productive long into the late 80s and 90s. The National Science Foundation reports that at age 69 more than 29% of scientists and engineers with PhDs still work full time, compared to 13% of scientists with a M.S. or B.S. degree. Marion Diamond, an active senior scientist at 75, published data showing that brain cells can grow and learning can improve throughout life.

Of course genes and luck have a lot to do with how well one ages. Even so, gene expression is influenced by things like exercise, diet, and mental activity. Two genes have already been identified that become expressed as new memories are formed.

Too many seniors resign themselves to the ravages of age.  They will find, however, large benefits from challenging themselves in new experiences and competencies. Better yet, learning new things makes you feel good about yourself, especially when accomplishing things other people think you can’t do.

Sources:

1. Discover Magazine (2012). Special issue “2062 World Almanac.” October.

2. Rupp, R. (1998) Committed to Memory. New York: Random House.

3. Diamond, Marian (1993). An optimistic view of aging brain. The Free Library. http://www.thefreelibrary.com/An+optimistic+view+of+the+aging+brain.-a013700953

“Dr. Bill,” Senior Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M, is author of a new memory improvement book, Memory Power 101 (SkyhorsePublishing.com) and an e-book in multiple formats for students, Better Grades, Less Effort (Smashwords.com).

Memory Schemas: the Under-used Approach to Improving Education

I just attended a “memory schema” symposium at the annual meeting of the Society of Neuroscience. The “schema” idea is that memory of prior learning provides a framework or context for new learning. That is, new information is evaluated for relevance to preexisting schema, which may influence how readily new information transfers into memory.

The notion of schema stems originally from Harry Harlow’s ideas back in the 1940s. Harlow showed that when a monkey learns a new kind of problem, he solves it by slow plodding trial and error. However, if he has experience with a large number of problems of a similar type or class, the trial and error is replaced by a process in which the individual problems are eventually solved insightfully. For example, if you learn how to do task A, B, and C, when presented with a new task D, you might say to yourself, “I don’t know how to do this task D, but it is like task B, and I do know how to do that!” Thus, you have a leg up on learning how to do task D. The idea underlies how people become experts in a given field: their accumulated learning of various tasks provides them with a repertoire of what Harlow called “learning sets” that makes it easier to learn new things.

Few of the speakers or audience discussants seemed to be aware of this literature, and their ideas weren’t really all that new, except that the focus is now shifting to memory instead of insight. The basic idea of memory schemas is that associations among learning objects profoundly affect how easily and well a person can remember. Certainly, memory is promoted when learning objects are congruent, that is, have meaningful relationships. Sometimes, however, you can easily remember incongruent items because they are so different. These ideas are important to education, and in the panel discussion at the end of the symposium, speakers were asked to address this matter. But nobody did. And in school systems, few educators do either.

Master teachers have always known intuitively to structure meaningful relationships among learning objects. In principle, this is done by creating associations of word pairs, concepts, spatial locations, and assorted rules and principles. All these things make it easier for students to learn. The problem is that we educators don’t devote enough thought about practical ways to create structured relationships that will promote memory formation and recall. I don’t follow much of the educational research literature, but I suspect that very little of it focuses on the best way to organize the presentation of learning materials. For instance, has anybody conducted an experiment that tests how well students learn the central concepts in the U.S. constitution and its amendments, depending on how the concepts are presented? Or what’s the best way to structure learning objects in the teaching of cell organelles and their functions? Typically, in the latter case for example, a biology teacher considers each organelle in turn and spews out information on what it does. That may not be the most memorizable way to present the information. Maybe it would be better to begin with the biological needs of the cell, how those needs relate to each other, and then how various organelles fulfill those needs. In fact, I took that kind of approach in the on-line biology curriculum I wrote, but no experiment has compared the ease of learning this way versus the traditional approach. I do know from my own experience with trying to learn a little Spanish that the ease of memorizing verb conjugations was greatly affected by how I laid out the words in a table.

To return the schema symposium, the experiments reported made it clear that structured relationships of learning objects improve all aspects of learning: encoding, memory consolidation, and recall. The time has come to develop teaching strategies that exploit the brain’s preferred mode of operation.

One example is the development of a PowerPoint method I developed to create a one-flash card of learning objects that consists of mnemonic icons systematically placed in specified spatial locations. The images represent concepts to memorize, and the spatial locations create spatial relationships that promote memory of the learning objects. For details, see my e-book for students.

In more general terms, the primary task of teachers and students is to develop strategies to enrich the formation of memory schemas. This means finding ways to increase the number and congruence of associations among facts and concepts being taught. The research shows that major benefits can be expected. 

Source:

Harlow H F. 1949. The formation of learning sets. Psychol. Rev. 56:51-65.

Klemm, W. R. 2012. Better Grades, Less Effort. (e-book in all formats at Smashwords.com)

Van Kesteren, M. T. R., and Henson, R. N. A. 2012. The re-emergence of schemas in memory research: from encoding to reconsolidation. Society of Neuroscience Symposium. New Orleans.

Behavioral Therapy Erases Bad Memories: Timing Matters

It has taken 50 years, but memory research has finally put it all together to provide practical guidance to reduce forgetting of what we need to remember and promote forgetting of useless or disturbing memories.

I have blogged before about animal studies showing that bad memories can be erased. Bad memories are often created like conditioned reflexes in Pavlov’s dogs. That is, the situational context in which bad things occur act as associational cues that help cement the memory. If the cues are repeatedly present but the bad event is not, the learned associated tends to go away.

But in both animals and humans, this “extinction” as it is called is not really permanent and the bad memories can recur.  

Memory researchers have recently discovered that when a memory is recalled, whether good or bad, there is a short time where it can be modified by new thought or experience, and then it is put back in storage (called “reconsolidation”). When this phenomenon was discovered, it raised the possibility that timing of extinction trials might influence effectiveness of treatments for anxiety. That is, better treatment results might occur if extinction is attempted during the vulnerable reconsolidation stage. In 2009, Joseph LeDoux and his colleagues demonstrated in rodents that timing of extinction trials did in fact influence the erasure of fear memory.  

This modifiable stage provides a way to treat even really bad memories, like post-traumatic stress disorder. When a soldier, for example, recalls a bomb killing a buddy, that terrible memory is subject to modification before it is re-stored. A typical modern treatment for PTSD is to inject an anxiety-reducing drug just before the bad memory is triggered that interferes with reconsolidation of memory. This process may have to be repeated many times before the bad memory is finally gone. Now a new study from the Uppsala University in Sweden has shown that bad memories can be erased without drug.

Investigators created bad memories in human volunteers by giving them an electric shock each time a certain picture was flashed on a computer screen. They repeated this experience 16 times to establish a conditioned fear response. The next day after such training, the subjects were brought back into the test room, and the fear-of-shock memory re-triggered by showing the picture that had been associated with shock. This was repeated eight times without associated shock, as a way to produce extinction. Half of the subjects received their extinction treatments at 10 minutes later in which the fearful stimulus was repeated without any shock. The other half of the subjects were given the same extinction treatment but delayed six hours, when it was presumably too late to interfere with reconsolidation.

To measure the amount of fear evoked by later presentations of the picture, investigators objectively measured the amount of fear, using a skin conductance test that measured essentially how sweaty the palms were. Signs of fear were absent in the group given extinction trials at 10 minutes when reconsolidation was still in progress. But signs of fear persisted in the six-hour group.

To pursue questions about what was happening in the brain, investigators used brain imaging, and particularly noticed activity changes in the amygdala, a structure deep within the brain that is hyperactive in the presence of fear memories. On the third day, all subjects were brought back to the lab and brain scans run when the fearful image was shown. In those subjects in the six-hour group, activity in the amygdala predicted whether signs of fear (skin conductance) would return. No such prediction occurred in the 10-min group. In other words, people who lost their fear memory, as indicated by skin sweating, also lost the signs of the memory in the amygdala. Similar effects were seen in the network of other brain areas linked to the amygdala in the processing of fear memories.

None of this should have been surprising. Back in the 1960s, I and many others conducted studies in animals that showed memory of a learning event depended on what happened shortly after the learning. We knew that this short window of time was vulnerable to other mental events that could prevent memory consolidation. Implications for education were obvious: multi-tasking, for example, introduces mental events that interfere with memory consolidation. But one wonders why it took science 50 years to apply what we knew about consolidation to the treatment of anxiety disorders. The key was the recent discovery that recall of a memory puts it back in the vulnerable position of having to be reconsolidated.

Source:

Agren, T. et al. (2012). Disruption of reconsolidation erases a fear memory trace in the human amygdala. Science. 337 (6101): 1550-1552. 

Judging Learning Effectiveness During Learning

When students study, they may monitor their progress during a study session by periodically forming judgments on how well they are remembering the material. Such judgments guide how much further study is deemed necessary. Researchers have studied this matter in the case of paired associate learning (where you learn lists of word pairs like dogs-cats, newspaper-book, etc.).  In particular, researchers looked for correlations between later memory recall either immediately after learning or after a short delay in which judgments about learning are based on a covert attempt to recall. Results indicate that making judgments about how well something will be remembered can be just as efficient as taking an actual test.

In delayed judgments, the student typically makes an initial covert recall effort and then, based on that, judges how well the material was learned. Future recall tends to correlate with predictions on recall on a future test. That is not so surprising, other than the fact that other studies have shown students over-estimate what they have learned and under-estimate how much additional student would be beneficial.

A retrieval attempt directly reveals evidence of how well memory has formed. The act of retrieval itself may enhance learning. Successful retrieval could constitute an additional reinforcing learning opportunity. Indeed, other studies have shown that testing may lead to better final recall than a comparable amount of study. When an item is retrieved in covert recall and leads to a high judgment of learning, the item gets a long-term memory boost.

In the present study, the researchers directly compared final recall and delayed judgments of learning of paired association of lists of 40 words in Swedish (the native language of the subjects) and Swahili under differing testing conditions. One hundred twenty-one Swedish college students were divided into experimental groups: 1) repeated study and testing (study-test, “ST group”), 2) repeated study and termination of testing after the first successful recall test (study-test, dropout,“STd” group), and 3) repeated study and judgments of learning (study-judgment of learning “STjol” group).

Testing involved presenting the first word of a pair to serve as a cue to probe for recall of the associated word. All groups received four initial learning episodes with 5 seconds per item, after which they had 8 seconds to respond to test on the item (ST, STd) or render a judgment on their prediction of cued recall for that item a week later (STjol). All groups were compared for their performance on the same test a week later.

The ST group went through four successive study-test sessions, in each of which they studied all 40 word pairs on a computer screen. Immediately at the end of the list, the students took a 30-second distractor test (math quizzes). Then their recall was explicitly tested by presenting each Swahili word, whereupon they had 8 seconds to provide the Swedish equivalent. Students experienced four such study and test sessions. A similar procedure was used for the STd group, except that on any given test, each correctly recalled item was dropped from subsequent tests; thus the number of word pairs dropped from 40 on the first test to the number of pairs missed on the previous test.

The STjol group experienced a similar process including the 30 second distractor task, except that the test trials were replaced by jol trials. That is, instead of being required to provide the Swedish word that matched the Swahili probe word, the subjects were given 8 second to render a judgment for each word pair by answering this question: “How certain are you that you will recall the Swedish word in a week when we test you again? “ Students used a rating scale of 20% sure, 40%, 60%, 80%, 100%.

During the learning phase, the two ST groups increased their scores at about the same rate from the first session to the fourth. Thus, dropping a pair from testing once it was recalled correctly did not seem a disadvantage to learning. Authors assume the jol groups would have increased scores similarly, but of course they were not explicitly tested during the learning phase. Their prediction scores did, however, increase over the four sessions at a similar rate as recall did in the ST groups.

The key issue was elucidated on the memory test a week later. The ST group had better recall than the STd group, thus revealing that dropping items during study had long-term consequences. This is reminiscent of studies by others on flash cards that showed that best long-term recall was produced by re-testing with all cards in the deck, including those that were

answered correctly in a previous self-test.

The jol group performed better on the final test than the STd group but results were about the same as those for the ST group. Thus, making a delayed judgment during the learning phase about how well one has learned was just as effective for recall a week later as actually being tested during the learning phase.

What do we make of that? It seems that to make a prediction for ability to recall word pairs, a person has to first make a covert recall effort. If you covertly recall a word readily, you would like give a judgment rate of 100%, whereas if you struggled with covert recall, you might judge future recall at only 40%, for example. To make such judgments, the learner has to monitor the learning in real time. Such monitoring in order to render a judgment entails covert self-testing, which these results suggest is just as effective long term as explicit testing.

Such results confirm what we know about memory being promoted by self-testing, whether explicit or covert. As a practical matter for study strategies where it is inconvenient to take actual tests during study sessions, it prudent to conduct covert self-testing wherein a student asks questions like “how well have I remembered this item?” If the answer is “not well,” more study is called for.  Confident judgments will tend to be confirmed when taking a real test later. In other words, making judgments about learning effectiveness during a learning phase helps a student to monitor progress and know how much time to devote to study. In addition, making such estimates seems, in itself, to promote learning because covert self-testing is required.

Sources:

Jönsson, F. U., Hedner, M., and Olsson, M. J. (2012). The testing effect as a function of explicit testing of instructions and judgments of learning. Experimental Psychology. 59 (5): 251-257.

Roediger, H. L., and Karpicke, J. D. 2006. Test enhanced learning. Taking memory tests improves long-term retentio

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. 

A "follower" of this blog just steered me to an important post: http://www.onlinephdprograms.com/the-10-biggest-breakthroughs-in-the-science-of-learning/

It demolishes a couple of popular myths about learning. This is well worth checking out.

And don't forget my books: