Mind Control. You Can Have More Self Control than You Think

 

Who’s in charge in deciding what your brain thinks about? Many factors are involved, but you have more control than you might think.

Everyone has some degree of self-control that affects their beliefs, desires, thoughts, goals, plans, and feelings. Humans are unique in their capacity for self-control, which is generally assumed to arise from the relatively large frontal cortex in the brain. The neocortex even has a series of linked circuits that constitute an executive control system. Lack of self-control underlies many social and mental health problems. Failing at self-regulation can lead to obesity, addiction, poverty, sexual promiscuity, and other ill-advised behaviors. On the other hand, people with superior self-control are more likely to be "healthy, wealthy, and wise."

How do we learn such control? I identify five factors:

1.    Motivation

We are motivated by the brain's positive reinforcement mechanisms and our mental ability to adjust the set point for the level of reinforcement that satisfies us. Like a heater thermostat, if the setting is low, it doesn't take much heat to meet the demand. If the setting is high, we need more heat and for longer periods. How does one adjust the personal hedonistic set point?

One way to increase self-control is to have many alternative positive reinforcers that allow one to substitute "good" reinforcers for bad ones. Another way is to structure goals consciously so that achievement requires "good" reinforcers. You can seek the company of fellow beings who wish to share those same values and guidelines. Incentives matter.

2.    Mental Fatigue

Resisting temptation can be hard work. In secular life, we get refreshment from taking a vacation. Taking a vacation from resisting temptation is hardly the righteous choice. What then, do we do to refresh the self-control required for resisting temptation?

Capacity for self-control is apparently a "limited resource" that can be depleted. Replenishment takes time in which there are fewer demands. Maybe this is one advantage of vacations or retreats. Escape from tempting situations is akin to taking a vacation.

Our own negative thoughts wear us out. Distressing thoughts make it all too easy to obsess to the point of emotional exhaustion. Think of all the times you have lost sleep over something that troubles you. When awake, such obsession diminishes our productivity.  How do we inhibit such obsessive thought? Mental discipline is required. There are ways to train the brain to be more disciplined at screening out intrusive thoughts. One method, strangely enough, involves working-memory training tasks; these train the brain to focus and screen out distracting thought.[1]  Habitual intense prayer or meditation may do the same thing.

3.    Age

Young people usually have less self-control that adults. Educators assert that self-control in preschool-aged children is more associated with school success than is IQ.[2] Brain dysfunctions that alter self-control will increase impulsivity and often lead to anti-social and even violent behavior. Brain scans show that impulsive people have an abnormally small hippocampus and prefrontal cortex.[3] We don’t know if they were born that way or got that way by a lifetime of indulging their impulses.

Executive control capability may decline in the elderly, who may become less able to take care of their needs and control their life. A study of seniors (average age of 75) revealed a tendency for elderly to withdraw from social interactions, along with an associated tendency to become depressed.[4] Stress, which may well have a cumulative effect over the years, is compounded by the current stresses of old age. The adrenal-pituitary stress axis may be more active, resulting in a high blood pressure from adrenalin release and shriveling of neural synapses from excessive cortisol release.

Biochemical markers of inflammation increase with age. The cumulative stresses of a lifetime can cause increased anxiety, confusion, further stress, and depression. Thus, a vicious cycle of mental deterioration may ensue. In such a state, executive control fails, and the person may become helpless and dependent.

4.    Religion

"Mind over matter" is a central theme in most religions. The idea is that proper spiritual belief gives you the strength to cope with the vicissitudes of life. Paradoxically, the most religious people, like monks, may not use their strength of faith to cope with life but actually escape worldly stress by living in monasteries or nunneries.

Literature surveys reveal a strong relationship between religiosity and self-control. Self-control in religious people is manifest in that they tend to suffer less from depression, avoid trouble with sex or drugs, do better in school, and even visit the dentist more regularly. It is not clear whether religious experiences promote self-discipline or whether a self-disciplined person is more likely to respond to the self-control requirements of religion. It could be both. Whatever the case, to be mentally and spiritually healthy, we must learn to discipline our thinking, just as we discipline our body to improve our golf game or other physical skills.

An interesting survey of 213 people measured both the degree of self-control and religiosity.[5] People who believed in traditional religions were more likely to have motivational drive and strategic planning for their actions. Perhaps not surprisingly, people who had more superstitious beliefs were less likely to control impulsive behavior.

Prayer seems to be an active way to promote replenishment. A demonstration of this point comes from an experiment where subjects engaged in personal prayer or an equivalent time in free mind-wandering thought. A subsequent self-control test revealed superior scores for those in the prayer group.[6]

Adolescents seem to have less self-control than mature adults. One study involved 1,785 young adults of different religions (Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox- and Bible-belt Christians) in different countries.[7] Young people with intrinsic religiosity (living one's faith)  were less likely to exhibit deviant behaviors, such as theft, substance use, cheating, etc. than those driven by extrinsic religiosity (using one's faith for personal advancement). The religious beneficial effect was greatest in those who had low natural levels of self-control.

Most religions make a positive social impact by teaching and requiring self-control. Just thinking about God can improve our will power. One experiment demonstrated this in a trivial way by priming subjects with a pre-test task of unscrambling sentences that contained religious thoughts. The subsequent task was to drink an unpleasant mixture of orange juice and vinegar, for which they were paid for the amount they drank. Compared to a neutral-primed control group, the religion-primed group drank twice as much of the sour juice. In another part of the experiment, investigators told participants that when the study was over they would receive monetary compensation. If the participants came back the next day, they would receive $5, but if they came back a week later, they would receive $6. Even with the small $1 difference, a greater percentage of the participants in the religious-primed group decided to wait and receive the larger amount of money than those in the neutral-primed group.[8]

Some evidence indicates that people are more motivated toward good behavior if they view God as punishing rather than a God of love. In a study at Brigham Young University, Mormon students were assigned a task to button press when they saw a picture of juice or to inhibit the press when they saw a picture of beer (which their religion forbids). A neural signal over the anterior cingulate cortex that is known to be an error indicator became smaller when subjects were reminded of God's love instead of God's punishment. The interpretation was that focusing on God's love and forgiveness made students less worried about making mistakes in the task.[9]

One of the more obvious and measurable examples of religion effects is how it can reduce pain. A common way that medical service providers assess pain is to ask a patient to rate the intensity of pain on a scale of 0 to 10. In one experiment, 24 patients, half practicing Catholics and the other half avowed atheists, had been screened to have equal baseline pain thresholds. They were then given electrical shocks while staring at different images, some religious and others not. Pain scores dropped when viewing religious images, and non-religious images had no effect. Brain scans showed that when pain was reduced, the activity level was increased in the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, a region that other investigators had shown was instrumental in driving top-down circuitry that inhibits pain.[10] A simple explanation is that the pain-relief is like that afforded when a dentist twists your cheek as he inserts a needle to anesthetize a tooth or a veterinarian slaps a horse's hip as he simultaneous slams a needle to inject a medication. In these cases, the signals that ordinarily cause pain are mixed with other dominant signals that limit the brain's ability to feel pain.

5.    Yoga/Meditation

Yoga is a practice that most clearly illustrates the ability of the mind to control the body. The most obvious effects of yoga meditation are on breathing, which can be dramatically slowed and made more abdominal, and the cardiovascular system, in which heart rate slows and blood pressure drops.[11]  Yoga masters can alter bodily functions in even more profound ways, such as forcing extreme sweating or lying on a bed of nails. Mindfulness meditation, wherein attention is focused on breathing or a mantra, promotes the development of attentional skills and changes neural activity related to self-control.[12

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[1] Bomyea, J., and Amir, N. (2011). The effect of an executive functioning training program on working memory capacity and intrusive thoughts. Cognitive Therapy and Research, 35(6), 529-535. doi:10.1007/s10608-011-9369-8

[2] Blair, C., & Razza, R. (2007). Relating effortful control, executive function, and false belief understanding to emerging math and literacy ability in kindergarten. Child Dev., 7(8), 2nd ser., 647-663. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8624.2007.01019.x.

[3] Penney, S. (2012). Impulse control and criminal responsibility: Lessons from neuroscience. International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, 35(2), 99-103. doi:10.1016/j.ijlp.2011.12.004

[4] Boss, L., Branson, S., Cron, S., & Kang, D. (2016). Biobehavioral examination of religious coping, psychosocialfFactors, and executive function in homebound older adults. Religions, 7(5), 42. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/rel7050042

[5] Wain, O., & Spinella, M. (2007). Executive functions in morality, religion, and paranormal beliefs. International Journal of Neuroscience, 117(1), 135-146. doi:10.1080/00207450500534068

[6] Malte Friese, Michaela Wänke, Personal prayer buffers self-control depletion, In Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 51, 2014, Pages 56-59, ISSN 0022-1031, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2013.11.006.

[7] Klanjšek, R., Vazsonyi, A. T., & Trejos-Castillo, E. (2012). Religious orientation, low self-control, and deviance: Muslims, Catholics, Eastern Orthodox-, and “Bible belt” Christians. Journal of Adolescence, 35(3), 671-682. doi:10.1016/j.adolescence.2011.09.003

[8] Rounding, K., Lee, A., Jacobson, J., Ji, L., Religion replenishes self-control. (2012). Psychological Science, 23(6),  635-643.

[9] Good, M., Inzlicht, M., & Larson, M. J. (2014). God will forgive: Reflecting on god's love decreases neurophysiological responses to errors. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, doi:nsu096 [pii]

[10] Wiech, K., Farias, M., Kahane, G., Shackel, N., Tiede, W., & Tracey, I. (2008). An fMRI study measuring analgesia enhanced by religion as a belief system. PAIN, 139(2), 467-476. doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pain.2008.07.030

[11] Olex, Stephen, Andrew Newberg, Andrew, and Figueredo, Vincent M., (2013). Meditation: Should a cardiologist care?, International Journal of Cardiology, 168(3),1805-1810,

[12] Moore, A., Gruber, T., Derose, J., & Malinowski, P. (2012). Regular, brief mindfulness meditation practice improves electrophysiological markers of attentional control. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 6(18), 1-15.

Lesson 14c. Memorize While You Sleep

Get enough sleep to consolidate your memories.

Did you know that your brain works while you sleep? Yes, both during dreaming and non-dreaming, your brain is consolidating memories of events in the immediately preceding day.

Most people think that the purpose of sleep is to rest the brain. But there is clear evidence that the brain is still busily at work during sleep, even when the brain is not dreaming. Decades ago, researchers demonstrated that many neurons fired just as much during sleep as during wakefulness. Some neurons were even more active during sleep.

One advantage that sleep provides for memory consolidation is that the brain doesn’t have all the distractions that occur during daytime wakefulness. Multiple-conflicting stimuli and tasks are very disruptive to memory consolidation.

The advantages offered by having fewer disruptive influences during sleep have also been confirmed in a study conducted in the brain imaging lab of Thomas Pollmacher in Munich, Germany. An auditory text stimulus was presented to sleep-deprived subjects prior to and after the onset of sleep, and imaging was performed to compare wakeful responses to sound stimuli with those during various stages of non-dreaming sleep. Brain activity during sleep was suppressed in auditory pathways and visual cortex, including other brain regions that are interconnected with the visual cortex. Suppression suggests that sleep shields the brain from the arousing effects of external stimulation that might disturb sleep. Blocking out such interference effects should facilitate memory consolidation. This study also prompted researchers to conclude that consolidation of memory occurs over many hours, at least in sleep-deprived subjects. That is to be expected, inasmuch as consolidation of memory depends on protein synthesis and physical changes in synapses.

Students often cut back on sleep to finish ever-mounting piles of homework and study. Combat soldiers are trained to function under sleep-deprived conditions. But these strategies are likely counter-productive. At my university, our Corps of Cadets used to have a tradition of rousing freshmen in the middle of the night and preventing them from sleeping. The idea was to make them tough. More likely, it just made them unable to do well in school, as I have seen many of them flunk out.  Another area where this problem has surfaced is with sleep-deprived medical residents.

Sleep loss degrades many brain functions. In one study, sleep loss degraded visual vigilance and memory for words, and time-of-day fluctuations were found in choice reaction time, logical reasoning, and word memory. Exercise also seemed to have an effect in that brain function of non-exercising subjects degraded sooner than they did for exercising subjects. So, sleep-deprived couch potatoes beware!

Researchers have found that people who stay up all night after learning and practicing a new task show little improvement in their performance. No amount of sleep on following nights can make up for the toll taken by the initial all-nighter.

Robert Stickgold and colleagues at Harvard Medical School report that people who learned a particular task did not improve their performance when tested later the same day but did improve after a night of sleep. To see whether the night of sleep actually caused the improvement, Stickgold trained 24 subjects in the same visual discrimination task, which consisted of identifying the orientation of three diagonal bars flashed for a sixtieth of a second on the lower left quadrant of a computer screen full of horizontal stripes. Half of the subjects went to sleep that night, while the other half were kept awake until the second night of the study. Both groups were allowed to sleep on the second and third nights. On the fourth day, both groups were tested on the visual discrimination task. Those who slept the first night identified the correct orientation of the diagonal bars much more rapidly than they had the first day. The other group showed no improvement, despite the two nights of catch-up sleep.

Another compelling study for the role of sleep on memory consolidation was published by Sean Drummond and his colleagues at San Diego State University and the University of California, San Diego.  They combined memory performance with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to study sleep deprivation effects on verbal learning of young, healthy adults. After a sleepless night, free recall fell by about half, and the brain imaging analysis showed reduced blood oxygen activity in the temporal area. However, the areas of the prefrontal cortex that had been activated during remembering after normal sleep worked even more after sleep deprivation. What's more, the bilateral parietal lobes and two additional areas in the prefrontal cortex, usually not activated after normal sleep, became active.

What about a small degree of sleep loss? A University of Pennsylvania study showed even a little sleep loss can devastate memory. People were assigned to sleep regimens of four, six, or eight hours of sleep each night for two weeks and tested periodically during the daytime for mental performance. Subjects who got four or even six hours of sleep performed as poorly on brain function tests as they did when kept from sleeping at all for three consecutive days. So, short-changing your sleep each night by an hour or so builds up a sleep debt that affects attention and working memory. In the study, performance decline was cumulative. An interesting aside from the study was that none of the 48 people in the study realized that their mental performance had deteriorated from the mild sleep loss. As a college professor, I wonder about the performance loss going on in students who short-change their sleep for months at a time.

There are also studies revealing lack of sleep BEFORE learning interferes with memory. Formally, this is called "proactive interference," because it occurs in advance. The cause may relate to what was just explained: a sleepy brain doesn’t think effectively.

In another study, 28 healthy young adults were divided into two groups. On the first day, one group was kept awake for 35 straight hours. Participants in the other group spent a normal sleep night at home. At 6 PM of the next day, all subjects watched a slide show of 150 slides of landscapes, objects, and people who weren't celebrities. All subjects then were sent home to have a normal night's sleep. The next evening all subjects took a pop quiz on the slides, which were randomly mixed with 75 new slides. The test was for subjects to recognize whether they had seen each slide before.

Those subjects who had been sleep deprived on the first night scored the lowest, even though they later had a night to catch up on lost sleep. The upshot of it all is that lack of sleep is bad for remembering, whether the sleep loss occurs before or after learning events. For those who wonder why humans need to sleep, one obvious benefit is to enhance learning.

Need to learn something quickly? Take a nap. Daytime naps are said to rejuvenate energy and lower stress. Now there is evidence naps speed up consolidation of memories.

Matthew Walker reports experiments showing nap enhancement of memory. In his study, 39 young adults were divided into two groups. At noon, all the participants took part in a memory exercise that required them to remember faces and link them with names. Then the subjects took part in another memory exercise at 6 p.m., after 20 subjects had napped for 100 minutes during the break. Those who remained awake performed about 10 percent worse on the tests than those who napped. Students take note: 10% is often the difference between an A and a B.

 

Sleep Sources

Drumond, Sean, Brown, Gregory, G., Gillin, J. Chrisstian, Stricker, John. L. (2000). Altered brain response to verbal learning following sleep deprivation. Nature 403(6770):655-7. DOI: 10.1038/35001068

Stickgold, R., James, L, and Hobson, J. (2000) Nature Neuroscience.  3 (12), 1237-1238. DOI:10.1038/81756

Van Dongen, H.P.A., Rogers, N.L. & Dinges, D.F. Sleep debt: Theoretical and empirical issues. Sleep Biol. Rhythms 1, 5–13 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1046/j.1446-9235.2003.00006.x

Walker, Matthew (2010). American Association for the Advancement of Science annual meeting presentation, San Diego, Feb. 21, 2010.

 

This concludes our lessons in this series on Learning How to Learn.

I believe and hope that you all will become more effective life-long learners.

 

Lifestyle Matters. Lesson 14b. Exercise

 

Be healthy. Be smart.

Exercise is not only good for the body; it is good for the brain.  The idea that exercise might benefit memory originally came from animal research revealing exercise increases learning and memory capability, presumably because exercise stimulates the birth of new nerve cells in the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is crucial for forming long-term memory. I have posted many articles on the benefits of exercise for the brain  at this blog site (type “exercise” into the search field).

It is now clear that exercise benefits memory capability in humans too, both old and young. In addition, the state of exercise is tied to memory; that is, state-dependent memory can be demonstrated with exercise. For example, in a study of humans exercising on a bicycle, word lists learned during the exercise were recalled best during another exercise episode, while words learned not riding on a bike were recalled best under that same condition. State-dependent learning has been demonstrated in other contexts too, such as with alcohol and with school-room environments.

Even when I was a kid, which was long before the whole notion of aerobic exercise, people said that being physically active could help you perform better in school. But this was mostly anecdotal, with very little research evidence. Now there is much solid evidence. Sadly, it may have come too late. Many schools have done away with or minimize physical education. Many girls think it’s not cool to sweat.

Charles Hillman and colleagues at the University of Illinois recently reported a study on the effects of exercise on cognitive function of 20 children aged 9 to 10. They administered some stimulus discrimination tests and academic tests for reading, spelling and math. On one day, students were tested following a 20-minute resting period; on another day, students walked on a treadmill before testing. The exercise consisted of 20 minutes of treadmill exercise at 60% of estimated maximum heart rate. Mental function was then tested once the heart rate returned to within 10% of pre-exercise levels. Results indicated improved performance on the tests following aerobic exercise relative to the resting session. Tests of brain responses to stimuli suggested the difference was attributable to improved attentiveness after just this one bout of exercise.

Note this is just from a single aerobic exercise experience. How can that be beneficial? The most obvious explanation is that exercise generates more blood supply to the brain, but I don't know that this has been documented. Actually, what is known is that exercise diverts blood to the muscles. The generally accepted view is that the body tightly regulates blood flow to the brain and that the brain always gets what it needs.

A more likely explanation is that single bouts of exercise relieve anxiety and stress, which are known to disrupt attentiveness and learning. Maybe the repetitive discipline of exercises like treadmill-walking help entrain the brain into a more attentive mode, akin perhaps to meditation. We need a study that compares treadmill walking with a different kind of exercise regimen (like a vigorous and competitive basketball game, for example).

As for what goes on in a typical school recess, I doubt that such activities as gossiping, text messaging, or whatever else goes on these days with kids at recess markedly interfere with learning.

There is also the possibility a continuing aerobic exercise program could produce long-lasting beneficial effects in young children. My own prejudice is that schools and parents ought to get serious about requiring aerobic exercise programs. It should not only improve the quality of school work but also help combat the epidemic of obesity and diabetes. One caveat: excessive running to achieve aerobic levels of exercise may not be advisable in children. My own experience with jogging, for example, might have been great for my heart and brain, but I now have two artificial knees and an artificial hip joint to show for it.

Here is another caveat you may have thought about: If exercise is so good for academic performance, why do varsity athletes generally make poorer grades than their classmates? Well, there are many other factors, of course. One prevailing attitude among athletes is that academics are less important to them than their sport. Athletes tend to devote their time and energy to their sport, not school work. They also have more incentive to focus on their sport. Students idolize athletic stars. But students who make all As are not considered heroes; they are often considered nerds or otherwise abnormal. What should be normal is to exercise both body and brain. 

Sources, Exercise

Hillman, C. H., Pontifex, M. B., Raine, L. B.,  Castelli,, D. M., Hall, E. E., and Kramer, A.F. (2009). The effect of acute treadmill walking on cognitive control and academic achievement preadolescent children, Neuroscience, 159 (3), 1044-1054, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroscience.2009.01.057.

Miles, Christopher, and Hardman, Elinoir. (2010). State-dependent memory produced by aerobic exercise. Ergonomics. 41(1), doi.org/10.1080/001401398187297

 

 

Lesson 14a. Lifestyle Matters: Effects of Stress

School is stressful. Students also commonly must deal with emotions arising from boy-girl problems, over-bearing parent problems, bullies, worries about school, frustrated attempts to be popular, and their future. College students have enormous adjustments to make in the transition from leaving home and the cloistered environment they were used to in high school. Older adults returning to school have to cope with paying the costs, finding time for the family, and for the job.

The aspects of lifestyle that have the greatest direct effect on learning deal with stress, exercise, and sleep. This post explores stress.

Stress

 All learning at some point involves stress. Acute stress, which releases adrenalin, can be a good thing. It pumps you up and promotes focused attention. However, chronic stress impairs learning. When students struggle to improve, chronic stress ensues and creates a vicious cycle in which the stress impairs performance, which produces still more stress.

I have written numerous science-based posts on the bad effects of chronic stress on the brain. To review these and type “stress” into the search field of this blog.

Scientists have long known that chronic stress is bad for your brain. Adolescence seems to be an especially vulnerable time. Not only is the adolescent brain still being built, the brain is being re-built during the teen years.

Human imaging studies show the cerebral cortex shrinks during adolescence. In a recent study of "adolescent" rats, researchers found that the cortex shrinks in both males and females, and there is a loss of neurons in the ventral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain humans use to make rational decisions and do higher-level thinking. More loss occurred in females than in males.

Until now, the reason for brain tissue loss has not been clear, but we may be able to explain it by considering the stresses that afflict teenagers, who routinely endure peer dismissiveness and bullying. Numerous animal studies show that stress impairs brain function and memory. Even single bullying exposures can be damaging.

Similar results have been reported in multiple humans studies. Here is a very real example of stress-related memory impairment from human bullying in schools that few may realize. In the study, young healthy men were tested for their ability to recall lists of 10 positive, 10 neutral, and 10 negative words. The men were given two minutes to learn the lists and were then tested immediately. Thirty minutes later they were given a psychosocial stress which included a fictitious job interview in front of live interviewers and counting backwards in steps of 17 in front of judges. Control groups did a five-minute speech and did the same counting, but not in the presence of judges. The next day, subjects were tested again (delayed recall) 10 minutes after cortisol injection. Other psychological tests were administered and the amount of cortisol in the saliva was measured at several key points in time.

The stressed group had elevated cortisol levels even though the stress was mild. Recall of both negative and positive emotionally arousing words was impaired, but there was no effect with neutral words. These effects could not be attributed to decreased attention or working memory span, which memory tests showed were not affected by the stress. Providing cues for recall eliminated signs of the stress effect on emotionally charged words.

So, this study shows recall of emotionally charged information can be impaired under stressed conditions. Imagine how great the deleterious effect of stress could be in situations where there is real stress, as in witnessing car accidents, crimes, or dangerous situations in which recalling what happened could be very important. Studies like this are consistent with many real-life observations with eye-witness accounts, where what is remembered may well be false.

The most obvious stressor for students comes from examinations. “Test anxiety” causes students to choke, typically failing to recall information they know they know, but just can’t dredge up under stressful test conditions.

A couple of studies have shown that test scores rise if anxious students are allowed to write about their test worries for 10 minutes just before a test. It also works to write down attributes of successful problem solving just before a test.

Why does this writing alleviate test anxiety? One study showed that such writing increased student engagement in the test. That is, students who were anxious were distracted by their anxiety and did not fully engage in solving the problems in the test.

Such writing before an exam is only beneficial for students who suffer from test anxiety. Other students don’t need this, and may in fact do worse by such a distraction. The best way to deal with choking on tests is to: 1) thoroughly know and understand the material being tested, and 2) develop long-term confidence by a string of test successes. If you truly “know your stuff” and believe in your ability as a student, there is no justification for test anxiety.

 Next Lesson: 14b. Lifestyle Matters: Exercise

Stress Sources:

Merz, Christian (2010). Stress impairs retrieval of socially relevant information. Behavioral Neuroscience. 124 (2), 288-293.

Newcomer, J. W., Selke, G., Melson, A. K., Hershey, T., Craft, S., Richards, K., et al. (1999). Decreased memory performance in healthy humans induced by stress-level cortisol treatment. Archives of General Psychiatry, 56, 527–533.

Vogel, Susanne (2016). Learning and memory under stress: implications for the classroom. Science of Learning 1(1), 16011. DOI: 10.1038/npjscilearn.2016.11

Young, A. H., Sahakian, B. J., Robbins, T. W., & Cowen, P. J. (1999). The effects of chronic administration of hydrocortisone on cognitive function in normal male volunteers. Psychopharmacology (Berl), 145, 260-266.

Zoladza, Phillip R., Ashlee J.Warneckea, Sarah A.Woelkea, Hanna M.Burkea, Rachael M.Frigoa, Julia M.Pisanskya, Sarah M, Lylea, Jeffery N.Talbotb (2013). Pre-learning stress that is temporally removed from acquisition exerts sex-specific effects on long-term memory. Neurobiology of Learning and Memory. 100, 77-87 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nlm.2012.12.012

Make neuroscience religion’s ally

TriuneBrain Trailer Low Res

Especially Difficult Memorization Tasks. Lesson 13.

 

Some memory work seems more difficult than others. We have already covered learning math. Here we will consider such tasks as expanding vocabulary, learning foreign language, and remembering dates and places, and music.

Vocabulary

The obviously important factor in thinking is vocabulary (or, in math, number fluency). Everyday thought is conducted with words. A limited vocabulary limits the range and rigor of thought. Sadly, young people generally have limited vocabularies. I see this every year even with upper-division college students in a course where I require them to write essays. They frequently use words that don't match the ideas they are trying to convey and fail to use words precisely. Children who grow up in culturally deprived homes are handicapped because they are exposed to the limited vocabularies of their parents. Teachers and parents should make it a point to expose children to new works and to instill a commitment to using words precisely.

Research suggests that some review sessions need to be widely spaced by two months or more from the initial learning. The amount and spacing of foreign language vocabulary learning has an enormous effect on how well the material is retained years later.  In one study, 300 English-foreign word pairs were studied with either 13 or 26 relearning review sessions at intervals of 14, 28, or 56 days. Retention was tested for 1, 2, 3, or 5 years after the end of training. Although longer intervals between learning a review impaired acquisition slightly, this was offset by substantially higher long-term retention.  Thirteen review sessions spaced at 56 days yielded retention comparable to 26 sessions spaced at 14 days apart.

One experiment related to flash cards has examined the role that retrieval had on the ability to recall that same material after a delay of a week. College students were to learn a list of 40 foreign language vocabulary word pairs, which were manipulated so that the pairs either remained in the list (were repeatedly studied) or were dropped from the list once they were recalled. It is like studying flash cards: one way is to keep studying all the cards over and over again; the other way is to drop out a card from the stack every time you correctly recalled what was on the other side of the card.

Number of self-testing events and their spacing are influenced by the number of retrievals that are correct. It helps to repeat self-testing on cards already correctly recalled. In one study where students studied flash cards of 35 Swahili-English word pairs, the students were asked to practice until they got the vocabulary correct using either the entire stack or five stacks of seven cards each. Researchers instructed students to study the flashcards until they had gotten each translation correct either once, five, or 10 times, before taking a final quiz a week later. Getting the stack correct five times was three times more effective for the final quiz than getting the stack correct only once. Also, study of one big stack was better than five little ones.

A related study examined the correctness effect when college-aged students were asked to study for a week a pack of 48 paired Swahili vocabulary words with their English translations. To facilitate learning, students were taught to use a cue (word, phrase or concept) to link both words of a pair. Students controlled how many times they felt they needed to repeat study of a word pair until they reached 1, 3, 6, or 9 correct retrievals. Immediately after finishing the learning, students gave an estimated rating of how well they thought they had learned the material. On an examination given one week later, gains in correct answers were larger with more correct retrievals during the study period.

Student predicted judgments of their learning are important in real-world study because such judgments govern how long students will practice what their assigned learning. Judgment of learning success was found to depend on the number of self-testing events, their spacing, and the number of correct retrievals.

Another study established that best learning occurs when students can correctly recall items multiple times during the initial learning experience. In that study, students studied 70 Swahili-English word pairs either 1,3,5,7,8, or 10 times during encoding. For example, a cue and target pair were initially presented to study for 10 seconds. Then during practice the cue was presented and learners were given eight seconds to show they could recall the target. Incorrect recalled targets were given a four-second restudy opportunity before moving on to the next word pair. Pairs continued to be rehearsed until they reached the assigned level of correct remembering (1, 2, 3, etc.). The subjects were divided into two groups, one taking an exam within 25 min after study and rehearsal and the other one week later. Results revealed best final exam performance when the test-item presentation intervals were long and when the final test occurred 25 min after the study and rehearsal. Almost none of the word pairs were learned when the learning occurred when the intervals were short and the final test was delayed for a week. The best final learning occurred when the initial learning practice retrievals were correct and when more time elapsed between each recall attempt (6-minute lag versus 1-minute lag).

There are some other general strategies for building vocabulary. I have a couple of ideas based on memory principles.

            Learn word prefixes and suffixes. Prefixes and suffixes are great aids. “Pre” suggests before or ahead of time; “ism” suggests a state of being, “re” suggests back or again, and so on.      

            Learn word families. Many words come from the same family. If you know what one word in the group means, you can get the general idea for the others from the context in which they are used. The other words will be easier to remember because they are similar to the word you already know. Here are some word groups.

            despise, despicable, despot, despotism, despoil

            habit, habitat, habitation, habitual, habitué

            jet, jettison, jetstream, jetty, jet set, jetlag, jetsam

            line, liner, lineman, linear, line drive, line-up

            parent, paternal, pater, patriarch, paternity, patrician, patricide

Create images for strange new words. Examples:

            Gazebo: see yourself staring (gazing) at the ugliest boy (bo) you ever saw standing in a             building that only has a roof, no walls. Feel disgust.

            Adumbrate (meaning incomplete understanding or explanation): see a “dumb brat” with a dunce cap, sitting in the corner partially hidden by a screen. Sense the pain he must feel at being so ostracized and tries to hide.

            Daguerreotype (an early photographic process on metal plate): visualize a picture on a sheet of metal and you have stabbed it with a dagger because you hate it so much.

            Perspicacious (meaning especially insightful): see yourself working up a sweat (perspire), scratching your head with question marks around it, then jumping up with a eureka  moment when you realize you figured it out.

Foreign Language 

In this globally interconnected world, many people want to learn a foreign language. In my own case decades ago, I stumbled through Russian and French because they were required for my Ph.D. Most recently, I am trying Spanish, because I live in Texas.

            Some things I know that help learning foreign language is the use of flash cards for vocabulary (using images, not just the words).

            Another thing I know is the value of strategic approaches and planning. For example, I first have to confront my negative attitude (negative attitudes impair learning). I have a negative attitude about the irrational things in language. Take the gender business in Spanish and many other languages. Why does everything have to have a sex identification, like male and female endings for inanimate objects? That is just plain stupid! Irregular verbs are another problem. When I was in high school, I learned Latin, which wasn’t so bad, because it was a much more orderly language than the modern languages that “evolved” from it. Latin wasn’t broken. Why didn’t people leave it alone?

            My first strategic realization was that I had to get over my pique. Who was I punishing with my negative attitude? Certainly not the people who created the irrationalities in the language. No, my attitude would be a de-motivator for me to learn. So, I tell myself, “Get over it.”

            Next, I think about some basic principles that might expedite my learning. You don’t have to be a professor of modern languages to know that certain key components in language include the following:

1.       Meaning of words. Here, try to recognize cognates (words similar to English words you already know. For other words, try to think of mental images that represent the meaning.

2.       Gender identification. Fortunately, you can usually predict whether a word is male or female just from the meaning of the word. Most macho-type words are male; soft, feminine type words are usually female. Unfortunately, there are exceptions, which you just have to memorize by brute force.

3.       Verb conjugation. Look for patterns. All “regular” verbs have the same pattern. In Spanish, all verbs end in AR, ER, or IR. The conjugation pattern is similar. For each, you drop the infinitive ending and add endings to the stem of the word. For AR words, the ending is either o, as, a (singular) or amos, ais, or an (plural). For ER words, the endings are o, es, e (singular) or emos, eis, en (plural). For IR words, the endings are o, es, e (singular), or imos, is, en (plural). Even irregular verbs have generally predictable patterns, except for a couple of endings.

4.       Counting. Here, again, look for patterns. In Spanish you have to brute-force memorize the first 19 numbers, but thereafter predictable patterns emerge.

5.       Articles, like “a,” and “the.” In Spanish, you only have to remember “un” for “a.” But, since the article has to be a gender match to the word it refers to, you have to add an “a” (una) to refer to female words. If you are referring to a definite person, you must use “el” or “la,” depending on the person’s gender. Plural references add an “s” (as in “los/las”)

Pronouns, like I, you, he, etc. In Spanish, there is a definite pattern that includes gender recognition and singular vs. plural. It becomes easier to remember if you organize words in a table.

	Female	Male	Male or Male/?
This That These Those	esta      esa       estas esás	esto or este eso or ese	estos esos

 

Well, you may not want to learn Spanish, so I won’t expand further. My point here is that learning is greatly facilitated when you look for patterns. Memorize the patterns, and it is easier to memorize the specifics.

            The point is this: structure your learning material in ways that work best for you. Develop a strategy. Look for patterns. A strategic approach should also include developing ways to categorize things in the most useful way for memorization.

Dates and Places

There is a number coding system that makes it easier to remember numbers. This is especially useful for remembering dates. The code is as follows:

The principle is to first convert an integer (0 through 9) to a letter that is a consonant. Then insert vowels between the consonants to create a word that can be imaged. Words are constructed by insert vowels, which are neutral and do not affect the scheme. Think of vowels as wildcards. So, in the example above, 44 stands for “rower,” with the word constructed by inserting appropriate vowels between the two r’s that represent number four.

A set of rules determines how to construct number-associated images. The rules dictate what letters and sounds go with numbers 1 through 0, as follows:

 

Number — Letter or Sound — Mnemonic Aid

1 — t or d — each letter has one down stroke

2 — n or kg/gn — two down strokes (kn/gn have same sound)

3 — m — three down strokes

4 — r — last letter of word “four”

5 — L — Roman numeral  for the five in 50

6 — j,  ch, sh,   soft g — reverse J looks like 6,

7 — k, ck, hard g or c — attach a flipped 7 to a straight line on its left

8 — f, ph, v — F joined with another upside down F

9 — p or b — backwards p or a rotated b look like 9

0 — z, s, soft c — Z as in zero, soft c as in cent

 

It may seem like a lot of trouble to memorize these rules, but once done, it gives you a lot of memory power. You can construct all sorts of images based on these rules (see number-image list below for 1 to 100).

The words, all nouns, that you make up from these consonants can be a single word that includes all the consonants or several words that are sequentially linked. The number system can be useful for long-term remembering of some things, like dates, for example. If you wanted to remember that the Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776, you could build a memorable picture as follows: a number code for 1776 could be dog (17) and cage (76). Couple this with whatever image comes to mind for the Declaration, such as the liberty bell. Now picture your dog sleeping in its cage crate, being awakened by the ringing bell. For the link to July 4, you might want to add a firecracker image that goes off after the bell rings, like a Pavlov experiment where the bell rings, unconditioned firecracker stimulus goes off, and dog responds with jumping around in his cage.

The other use for this system is to create an easily remembered peg list. To convert this to a numbered peg list, you make up words using these rules. For example:

 

1  tie 2  knee 3 ma (mom) 4 rye 5 law 6 jaw` 7 key 8 ivy 9 bow 10 toes 11 tot 12 tin 13 dam 14 door 15 tail 16 dash (-) 17 tack 18 dove 19 tub 20 nose

21 nut 22 nun 23 Nero 25 nail 26 nacho 27 neck 28 knife 29 knob 30 mice 31 mat 32 moon 33 mummy 34 mower 35 mule 36 match 37 mug 38 movie 39 mop 40 rice

41 rat 42 rain 43 ram 44 rower 45 roll 46 roach 47 rock 48 roof 49 rope 50 lace 51 lot 52 lion 53 lime 54 lure 55 lily 56 leash 57 log 58 lava 59 lip 60 cheese

61 sheet 62 chain 63 jam 64 cherry 65 jail 66 judge 67 check 68 chef 69 ship 70 case 71 cot 72 coin 73 cam 74 car 75 coal 76 cage 77 cake 78 cave 79 cap 80 fez (hat)

81 foot 82 phone 83 foam 84 fur 85 file 86 fish 87 fog 88 fife 89 fob (watch fob) 90 bus 91 bar 92 bone 93 bum 94 bear 95 bell89 fob (watch fob) 90 bus 91 bar 92 bone 93 bum 94 bear 95 bell 96 beach 97 book 98 beef 99 pipe 100 daisy

 

Although the list has 100 pegs, they are relatively easy to memorize because they are constructed by a rule. If you know the rules for converting numbers to letters, you can even generate your own word peg in case you forget.

There are even more powerful uses of this code than remember numbers or dates. Suppose you are trying to memorize a textbook, page by page. Suppose on page 47 (rock) the page explains alpha rhythms, showing an EEG trace, and pointing out that they occur mostly when eyes are shut and that alcohol and sedatives lower the frequency. So, to remember this, you visualize a rock floating on ocean waves that look like the graphs you saw in the book. You only see this image when you shut your eyes. Imagine opening your eyes and the rock/wave image goes away. Shut your eyes, see the rock/waves again. Then imagine drinking a beer, and the waves get larger and slower (i.e., fewer of them).

You could go through a whole textbook like this. How would you deal with several textbooks? This problem, not easily solved, is how to un-remember what is on the pegs. After all, you use the pegs over and over again for different items. Actually, this did not seem to be a problem when I was using this system to memorize magazine content. Clearly, this system works best only for items you just want to remember for a short while.

Music

Music is hard for most people to learn. You not only have to memorize the notes, their timing, and sequence, but you have to train the body parts like fingers, lips, and tongue to execute the notes.

            “You’ve probably heard the old joke: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice, practice, practice!” Well music practice does take time, and it’s probably not a satisfying answer for people looking to learn music quickly. But surely there are techniques and strategies to expedite the process. Here’s one method I’ve created using related memory principles:

1.     Skim the whole score to identify hard and easy parts and phrases that repeat. Then start at the beginning, memorizing in chunks, one or a few bars at a time, depending on the capacity of your working memory. After memorizing a bar or phrase, see if you can play it without peeking. Musicians do not learn a new piece from beginning to end all at once. They often start at the beginning of a piece and learn a small section until they get it right. Then they learn the next piece. Then they practice stitching the pieces together. They repeat this process until they get to the end.

2.     Memorize the mechanical acts needed to play the notes (keys on a piano, valves on a clarinet, etc.). Learn one hand at a time. Look at the hands and keys while playing.

3.     Play what you have just memorized from memory and repeat until you feel it is mastered. Play one hand at a time, then play with both together. Don’t peek at the score until after you have played the section. Check for any errors in your recall.

4.     Play the chunk slowly at first, then test the tempo by playing with a metronome.

5.     Move to a different chunk and repeat steps 1-3. Add one bar or phrase at a time. Mark sections of the score as they are learned.

6.     Join the latest chunk with those previously learned and play from the beginning.

7.     In the next practice session, rehearse what was learned in the previous session before moving on to new material.

Sources:

Bahrick, H.P., Bahrick, L.E., Bahrick, A.S., & Bahrick, P.E. (1993). Maintenance of foreign language vocabulary and the spacing effect. Psychological Science, 4, 316–321.

Klemm, W. R.   Memory Power 101. (New York: Skyhorse).

 

 

Delibrate Practice. Lesson 12

 

In prior lessons we learned some of the key principles of memorization:

·       Lesson 1: encoding, consolidation, retrieval, reconsolidation

·       Lesson 2: getting motivated

·       Lesson 3: paying attention

·       Lesson 8: making associations

Photo by Jonathan Chng on Unsplash

We will learn how to implement these principles in this lesson on Deliberate Practice. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues came up with the idea of deliberate practice during the 1990s, based on their study of musicians. The researchers saw that deliberate practice requires considerable time investment, but it is more than just repeating what you are trying to master. It is not “drill and kill.” It is practice in which you:

·       Have a clear long-term objective in mind.

·       Plan what you need to do in detail.

·       Monitor how you executed the plan, with attention to specific details.

·       Noticing what to avoid and what to repeat in the future.

·       Apply corrective feedback to adjust the plan if needed and remind yourself what you need to do different next time.

·       Affirm and reward yourself for progress.

·       Get coaching from an outside source, like a teacher.

·       Keep raising the standards for acceptable performance. 

When I transitioned from a D student in the 4^th grade to an A student in the 7^th grade, I think the change was made possible through deliberate practice. Though I did not understand much about deliberate practice, I did intuitively use some elements of it. Penmanship class was likely the turning point, because deliberate practice is baked into the learning. When I looked a drawing of a cursive “a” and tried to duplicate it, the results were tangible and immediate. I had to think about where my drawing missed the mark and what I needed to do to make it look better. I had to keep repeating the process until what I produced looked like the instructional example. Aside from the utility of learning cursive, this may be the most beneficial example of teaching penmanship in school. Few schools do that these days.

 

Until you have mastered the learning goal, deliberate practice is a cyclic process that is repeated again and again. Most everyone has had this kind of learning experience at some point, usually when they are trying to perfect some kind of physical action. If you were in school band, for example, you used deliberate practice to memorize sheet music and master your instrument. If you were in a sport, you used deliberate practice in perfecting the movement skill sets.

If you did not have these experiences, here is one you can try right now: To perfect learning how to stand on one foot in a yoga pose, you could just do it repeatedly without thinking about what you have to do to make it work. Try it. You will see that does not work well. Now try it again, focusing on a visual spot far away and think about what muscles in your foot you have to activate to keep you balanced. These deliberate tactics will train you much faster to master this task.

Deliberate practice is not limited to physical movements. It is equally applicable to mastering school work. The practice objective might likely be to perform better on exams or to develop competence you know will be required in later courses.

Study sessions need to be strategic. That is, at the time you are studying, you need to think about what you need to do to make your memorization better. You may need to pump up your motivation level. You will need focus and self-discipline to work outside your comfort zone. Perhaps you need to invent better mnemonics. You need to think about how often to repeat self-testing forced recall. You need to contrive ways to apply what you are trying to learn. You need to take practice quizzes and solve related problems. You need a way to check on the completeness of your understanding. You need to have a way to check on the correctness of your recall and establish criteria for satisfactory mastery.

Next Lesson:

Especially difficult learning tasks

Sources:

Clear, James  (n.d.) Deliberate practice and how to use it. https://jamesclear.com/deliberate-practice-theory

Keep, Ben (n.d.) Deliberate practice in the classroom. The Learning Curve. https://www.the-learning-agency-lab.com/the-learning-curve/deliberate-practice-in-the-classroom