Mental practice & Mental rehearsal

Mental practice

In 1972, Corbin defined mental practice as the repetition of a task, without observable movement with the specific intent of learning’. It is to enhance performance in the absence of a physical activity.

There is some agreement that mental practice frequently has a beneficial effect on other the learning of a new skill or the betterment of performance of an existing skill.

Mental practice has been found to improve both cognitive and psychomotor performance.

The use of mental visualization in sports, mental practice was used in the context of sports psychology as a possible means for improving performance on a wide range of sport related task.

The mental practice most helpful to improve riding skills, is the mental practice of those skills in the midst of being improved or attempted for the first time.

Mental practice is most famous for the gains achieved in terms of muscle memory and the mental organization of sub-skills needed to successfully achieve a new skill.

Mental rehearsal

Mental rehearsal is one aspect of imaginary. It means the mental practice of performing a skill as oppose to actual practice. This is sometimes called mental practice and is a strategy adopted by many sportsmen and women.

It is a strategy for practicing something in mind before actually performing the task.

By mentally rehearsing it form mental image of the skill or event that the people are going to perform. No physical movements are involved in mental rehearsal. Some performers find mental rehearsal easier than other but the ability can be improved with practice. Mental rehearsal appears to be particularly useful in therapy settings with patients who are unable to engage in large amounts of physical practice because they lack endurance.

Mental rehearsal is used either to learn a new skill or to improve existing skills. There are a number of ways in which metal rehearsal is used including skills practice and rehearsal, practicing for events, competition practice, practicing ‘What if….?’, scenarios, replaying performance and performance routines.

Decision making :one of multiple category options

In the previous post, Decision-making learning from one’s mistakes., 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.

Music Effects on Cognitive Function of the Elderly

Whether the music is orchestral, rock, country, or jazz, most seniors like to listen to some kind of music. Music can soothe or energize, make us happy or sad, but the kind we like to hear does something that can be positively reinforcing or otherwise we would not listen to it. As my 80-year-old jazz trumpeter friend, Richard Phelps, recently said at his birthday party, "Where there is life there is music. Where there is music, there is life."

Relatively little research has been done on the effects of music on brain function in older people. But one study recently reported the effects in older adults of background music on brain processing speed and two kinds of memory (episodic and semantic). The subjects were not musicians and had an average age of 69 years.

The music test conditions were: 1) no music control, 2) white noise control, 3) a Mozart recording, and 4) a Mahler recording. All 65 subjects were tested in counter-balanced order in all four categories. The music was played at modest volume as background before and during performance of the cognitive tasks, a mental processing speed task and the two memory tasks. The episodic memory task involved trying to recall a list of 15 words immediately after a two-minute study period. The semantic memory task involved word fluency in which subjects wrote as many words as they could think of beginning with three letters of the alphabet.

Processing speed performance was faster while listening to Mozart than with the Mahler or white noise conditions. No improvement in the Mahler condition was seen over white noise or no music.

Episodic memory performance was better when listening to either type of music thatn while hearing white noise or no music. No difference was noted between the two types of music.

Semantic memory was better for both kinds of music than with white noise and better with Mozart that with no music.

Recognizing that emotions could be a relevant factor, the experimenters analyzed a mood questionnaire comparing the two music conditions with white noise. Mozart generated higher happiness indicators than did Mahler or white noise. Mahler was rated more sad than Mozart and comparable to white noise.

Thus, happy, but not sad, music correlated with increased processing speed. The researchers speculated that happy subjects were more around and alert.

Surprisingly, both happy and sad music enhanced both kinds of memory over the white noise or silence condition. But it is not clear if this observation is generally applicable. The authors did mention without emphasis that the both kinds of music were instrumental and lacked loudness or lyrics that could have been distracting and thus impair memory. I think this point is substantial. When lyrics are present, the brain is dragged into trying to hear the words and thinking about their meaning. These thought processes would surely interfere with trying to memorize new information or recall previous learned material.

A point not considered at all is personal preference for a certain types of music. There are people who don't like classical music, and the data in this study could have been made "noisy" if enough of the 65 people disliked classical music and were actually distracted by it. In other words, the effects noted in this study might have been magnified if the subjects were allowed to hear their preferred music.

My take-home lesson was actually formed over five decades ago when I listed to jazz records while plowing my way through memorizing a veterinary medical curriculum. Then, I thought that the benefit was stress reduction (veterinary school IS stressful and happy jazz certainly reduces stress). Now perhaps I see that frequent listening to music that was pleasurable for me might have actually helped my memory capability. If you still have doubts you might want to check my latest blog post, "Happy thoughts can make you more competent" (http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com/2015/01/happy-thoughts-can-make-you-more.html).

Anyway, now that I am in the elderly category, I see there is still reason to listen to the music I like. Music can be therapy for old age.

“People haven't always been there for me but music always has.”

    —Taylor Swift

"Memory Medic's" latest book is "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine." It is available in inexpensive e-book form at Amazon or in all formats at Smashwords.com.

Source:

Bottiroli, Sara et al. (2014). The cognitive effects of listening to background music on older adults: processing speed improves with upbeat music, while memory seems to benefit from both upbeat and downbeat music. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. Oct. 15. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2014.00284.

Study Smart Beats Study Hard

Keep your "nose to the grindstone" is the advice we often tell young people is an essential ingredient of learning difficult tasks. A joke captures the matter with the old bromide for success, "Keep your eye on the ball, your ear to the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel: Now try to work in that position."

Over the years of teaching, I have seen many highly conscientious students work like demons in their study yet don't seem to learn as much as they should for all the effort they put in. Typically, it is because they don't study smart.

In an earlier post, I described a learning strategy wherein a student should spend short (say 15-20 minutes) of intense study followed immediately by a comparable rest period of "brain-dead" activity where they don't engage with intense stimuli or a new learning task. The idea is that during brain down-time the memory of just-learned material is more likely to be consolidated into long-term memory because there are no mental distractions to erase the temporary working memory while it is in the process of consolidation.

Now, new research suggests that too much nose-to-the-grindstone can impair learning. Margaret Schlichting, a graduate student researcher, and Alison Preston, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Texas tested the effect of mental rest with a learning task of remembering two sets of a series of associated photo pairs.  Between the two task sets, the participants rested and were allowed to think about whatever they wanted. Not surprisingly, those who used the rest time to reflect on what they had just learned were able to remember more upon re-test. Obviously, in this case, the brain is not really resting, as it is processing (that is, rehearsing) the new learning. But the brain is resting in the sense that new mental challenges are not encountered.

The university press release quotes the authors as saying, "We've shown for the first time that how the brain processes information during rest can improve future learning. We think replaying memories during rest makes those earlier memories stronger, not just impacting the original content, but impacting the memories to come." Despite the fact that this concept has been anointed as a new discovery in a prestigious science journal, the principle has been well-known for decades. I have explained this phenomenon in my memory books as the decades-old term of "interference theory of memory,"

What has not been well understood among teachers is the need to alter teaching practices to accommodate this principle. A typical class period involves teachers presenting a back-to-back succession of highly diverse learning objects and concepts. Each new topic interferes with memory formation of the prior topics. An additional interference occurs when a class period is disrupted by blaring announcements from the principal's office, designed to be loud to command attention (which has the effect of diverting attention away from the learning material). The typical classroom has a plethora of other distractions, such as windows for looking outside and multiple objects like animals, pictures, posters, banners, and ceiling mobiles designed to decorate and enliven the room. The room itself is a major distraction.

Then, to compound the problem, the class bell rings, and students rush out into the hall for their next class, socializing furiously in the limited time they have to get to the next class (on a different subject, by a different teacher, in a differently decorated classroom). You can be sure, little reflection occurs on the academic material they had just encountered.

The format of a typical school day is so well-entrenched that I doubt it can be changed. But there is no excuse for blaring loudspeaker announcements during the middle of a class period. Classrooms do not have to be decorated. A given class period does not have to be an information dump on overwhelmed students. Short periods of instruction need to be followed by short, low-key, periods of questioning, discussion, reflection, and application of what has just been taught. Content that doesn't get "covered" in class can be assigned as homework—or even exempted from being a learning requirement. It is better to learn a few things well than many things poorly. Indeed, this is the refreshing philosophy behind the new national science standards known as "Next Generation Science Standards."

Give our kids a rest: the right kind of mental rest.

Sources:

http://www.nextgenscience.org/

http://scicasts.com/neuroscience/2065-cognitive-science/8539-study-suggests-mental-rest-and-reflection-boost learning.

Schlicthing, M. L., and Preston, A. R. (2014). Memory reactivation during rest supports upcoming learning of related content. Proc. Nat. Acad. Science. Published ahead of print, Oct. 20.

Dr. Klemm's latest book, available at most retail outlets, is "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus). See reviews at http://thankyoubrain.com

Health Benefits of Resveratrol: New Plaudits

Joe: My doctor told me to give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods.

Sam: What will you do?

Joe: I think I’ll give up my doctor.

I try not to get too excited about memory benefits of supplements, because too often the claims are not substantiated by studies that are well controlled and peer reviewed. I now think resveratrol may be one of the few supplements that benefits brain function.

When I wrote my first blog on research on resveratrol benefits for brain function and memory, there were over 2,000 scientific papers.[1]Don't worry; I am only going to tell you about a few studies.

Resveratrol is an active ingredient in red wine. This compound has been credited for explaining why red-wine drinkers in France, who drink more wine than most people, are healthier than would be predicted by their lifestyle of little exercise and eating lots of cheese. The problem is most studies suggest you would have to drink a 100 or more glasses of red wine a day to get much resveratrol effect (and that effect would obviously be negated by a toxic dose of alcohol). An obviously more healthful choice is the highly concentrated pill forms of resveratrol that are now on the market.

Most of the protective biological actions associated with resveratrol have been associated with its scavenger properties for free radicals and the protective effects that it confers on the heart and diabetes. 

One important study comes from a diabetes research group in Brazil recently who reported a beneficial effect of resveratrol on diabetic rats.[2]Resveratrol (in a modest rat dose of 10 and 20 mg per kilogram per day for 30 days) prevented the impairment of memory induced by diabetes. Resveratrol may be protecting neuron terminals that diabetes can damage. An earlier study by another group showed resveratrol improved glucose metabolism and promoted longevity in diabetic mice.

Another benefit of resveratrol is the anti-oxidant property. The brain produces more free-radical damage than other organs, because it burns so much oxygen. Compared with other organs, the brain has especially low levels of antioxidant defense enzymes. 

One recent study has revealed resveratrol had protective effects against brain damage caused by a chemical that kills acetylcholine neurons. Injection of this toxin into the brain of rats impaired their memory performance in two kinds of maze tasks. The impairment was significantly reduced by repeated injection of resveratrol (10 and 20 mg/kg) per day for 25 days, beginning four days before the toxin injection.[3]

Another recent study examined effects on working memory in mice fed a resveratrol-supplemented diet for four weeks before being injected with a cytokine to induce inflammation and accelerate aging. Resveratrol significantly reduced memory impairment in the aged group, but not in the young adults[4]. The lack of benefit in young adults was a little misleading, in that there was a "ceiling effect" in that the young adults were not impaired by the cytokine injection.

 The practical issue for us is whether resveratrol will help cognitive function in humans, especially healthy humans. It seems likely because other substances that have strong anti-oxidant properties seem to improve memory capability. Because animal studies have shown promise for resveratrol in preventing or treatment several different conditions associated with aging, several human clinical trials have been initiated.[5]

 An impressive new study of older humans, male and female, has just been reported.[6]Twenty-three healthy, but overweight people completed 6 months of daily resveratrol intake (200 mg ― the commercial brand I take has 300 mg/capsule). A paired control group got placebo pills. A double-blind design assured that neither the subjects nor the experimenters knew which individuals were in each group during data processing. Memory tests of word recall revealed significant improvement in the resveratrol group. Resveratrol also increased brain-scan measures of functional connectivity, which identified linked neural activity between the hippocampus and several areas of cerebral cortex.

Because others had shown that resveratrol increased insulin sensitivity in humans, these authors examine several markers important to diabetes. Resveratrol decreased the standing levels of sugar-bound hemoglobin, a standard marker for glucose control.  

What foods besides red grapes have resveratrol? The most likely other sources you would eat or drink are blueberries, cranberries, and peanuts. It is not likely that you could drink or eat enough of such substances to get enough resveratrol to do much good. Because of the scientifically documented benefits of resveratrol, highly concentrated supplements are now on the market (I have been taking it for a couple of years). I haven't given up my two glasses of red wine each day, but I have started taking one of the supplements. I haven't seen any reports that high doses of resveratrol are toxic.

---

[1] http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com/2010/04/resveratrol-red-wine-magic-chemical.htmlApril 4, 2010.

[2] Schmatz R, et al. (2009). Resveratrol prevents memory deficits and the increase in acetylcholinesterase activity in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. Eur J Pharmacol. 2009 May 21;610(1-3):42-8. Epub 2009 Mar 19.

[3] Kumar, A. et al. 2007. Neuroprotective effects of resveratrol against intracerebroventricular colchicine-induced cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in rats. Pharmacology.79 (1): 17-26. DOI: 10.1159/000097511

[4] Abraham, J., and Johnson, R. W. 2009. Consuming a diet supplemented with resveratrol reduced infection-related neuroinflammation and deficits in working memory in aged mice. Rejuvenation research. 12 (6): 445-453.  DOI: 10.1089/rej.2009.0888

[5]Smoliga, J. M. et al. (2011). Resveratrol and health – a comprehensive review of human clinical trials.  Mol. Nutrition Food Res. 55: 1129-1141

[6] Witte, A. V., et al. (2014) Effects of resveratrol on memory performance, hippocampal functional connectivity, and glucose metabolism in healthy older adults. J. Neuroscience. 34 23): 7862-7870.

"Memory Medic's latest book is for seniors (Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine," available in inexpensive e-book format at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/496252.  See also his recent book, "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

Creative imagination

There is a constant need of imagination. Synthetic imagination is the manipulation of effects. Creative imagination is causal that produce effects.

Creative imagination is more than mere memory. It takes the elements of the past as reproduced by memory and rearranges them.

Creative imagination plays a vital role in human daily life. Creative imagination is not inborn trait and it can be acquired with constant exercise.

The creative imagination galvanizing the mind propels it on a quest that transforms the already being constituted reality. It activates the minds radius of propensities and a fulgurating variation of virtualities.

Creative imagination is an essential aspect for achieving success. One needs to practice it incessantly in the same way they do anything else. Imagination can be sharpened largely if one practices creative thinking.
Creative imagination

Happy Thoughts Can Make You More Competent

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

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

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

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

Other experiments report broader word association performance when subjects are manipulated to be happier. For example, subjects in a neutral mood would typically associate the word “pen” as a writing tool and would associate it with words like pencil or paper. But positive mood subjects would think also of pen as an enclosure and associate it with words like barn or pigs. This effect has been demonstrated with practical effect in physicians, who, when in a happy mood, thought of more disease possibilities in making a differential diagnosis.
The review authors reported their own experiment on beneficial happy mood effects on insightfulness, using a task in which subjects were given three words and asked to think of a fourth word that could be combined into a compound word or phrase. For example, an insightful response to “tooth, potato, and heart” might be “sweet tooth, sweet potato, and sweetheart.” Generating such insight typically requires one to suppress dominant “knee jerk” responses such as associating tooth with pain and recognize that pain does not fit potato while at the same time becoming capable of switching to non-dominant alternatives.

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

Such effects of happy moods seem to arise from increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas that numerous prior studies have demonstrated as crucial parts of the brain’s executive control network. Similar effects have been observed in EEG studies. Other research suggests that the happiness effect is mediated by increased release of dopamine in the cortex that serves to up-regulate executive control.
The review authors described a meta-analysis of 49 positive-psychology manipulation studies showing that momentary happiness is readily manipulated by such strategies as deliberate optimistic thinking, increased attention to and memory of happy experiences, practicing mindfulness and acceptance, and increasing socialization. The effect occurs in most normal people and even in people with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Biofeedback training, where subjects monitor their own fMRI scans or EEGs, might be an even more effective way for people to train themselves to be happier.

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

For more on how positive mood influences memory ability, see my new book, Memory Power 101 (http://skyhorsepublishing.com ). Memory Medic's latest book explores the biology of mind. See "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

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

Grit's Role in Learning

What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence.

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

·         West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.

·         National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.

·         College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit.

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle." Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit has a payoff.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source:

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

Nine Steps to Remember What You Learn

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

Before

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

2. Check your foundation. Come prepared.

3. Expect to remember.

During

4. Pay Attention. Ask questions.

5. Take good notes.

6. THINK!

(soon) After

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

8. Apply what you just learned

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

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

Distributed practice

Distributed practice involves the inclusion of breaks into practice and is suited to continuous tasks which may become tiring. It is refers to the same amount of practice time, but distributed across more sessions.

For example, rowing would best be taught through distributed practice.  The breaks would allow the learner to engage in mental practice, which is process where the performer would ‘run; through’ the task at a cognitive level.

It is suggested that for a continuous skill a distributed practice schedule is preferable, whereas for discrete skill, mass practice is better.

In distributed practice the amount of time in rest is equal to or greater than the amount of time in work, whereas in massed practice schedule is a greater amount of time in work than in rest.
Distributed practice

Aging memory system

Working memory is the dynamic extension of primary memory. It is the ‘system that performs the task of temporarily manipulating information’.

Oder adults perform more poorly that their younger counterparts on tasks assess the combined processing and storage capacity of working memory, and these age-related working memory span differences account for a significant proportion of the age-related variance on written and spoken language comprehension tasks.

There is overwhelming evidence that normal adult aging is accompanied by a working memory deficit.  Aging is a natural process that must be studied intensively, for it to remains of one of the agonizing problems in all biology.

Interestingly, while aging is associated with significant declines in memory, the brain structures associated with encoding and memory show minimal age related volumetric declines. In this case the older adults fail to use spontaneously specific encoding and retrieving strategies.

Nonetheless, older adults can successfully acquire and apply strategies for the considering and retrieval of new information, of taught to do so.
Aging memory system

Handwritten Notes Lead to Better Learning

In response to the trend to abolish teaching of cursive in schools, about a year ago I posted an article on what I thought were the developmental benefits of handwriting (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter). That post has generated over 230 comments.

Now there is evidence that handwriting of lecture notes, compared to typing on a laptop, improves learning by college students. Following up on prior studies that indicated relative ineffectiveness of taking notes by laptop, researchers Pam Meuller and Daniel Oppenheimer provide clear evidence that handwritten note-taking produces better learning in college students.

They reported three experiments that compared the efficacy of college students taking notes by handwriting or with a lap top. Those who used handwritten notes that they studied later scored significantly higher than students using laptops, including fleet typists who took vastly more copious notes. Handwriters took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording. There are many possible explanations, beginning with the "less is more" idea in which too much information produces cognitive overload. Notably, when the typing students were told to avoid verbatim notes, they still did it. This suggests that there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing.  Handwritten notes involve more thought, re-framing, and re-organization, all of which promote better understanding and retention. The manual act of handwriting requires more engagement with the subject matter. Finally, handwritten notes capitalize on the use of drawings and of personalized spatial layout of the notes. Memorization involves not only what the information is, but where it is spatially located.

Added note: Readers interested in education are invited to join our Neuro-education group on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4883556&trk=my_groups-tile-grp)

Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. 23 April. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581

Stay focus and full attention while studying

You need to be able to focus well and put your full attention on what you are learning.  If you are distracted, information may not be encoded into short-term memory – making later study useless.

Attention is the first step in getting information into memory. If you are distracted while studying, you won’t be able to devote your full attention to the information you are trying to learn.

Set all other considerations aside for the time being. Be fully present in each moment, instead of letting your mind jump about to thoughts of the feature or the past.

Find a quiet place so you can concentrate on what you are reading, learning, or observing.

Don’t try studying while lying on your bed because the next thing you known, you’ll be asleep.
Stay focus and full attention while studying 

Educational Reform. Why It Is Not Working.

The chart below is telling: SAT scores have been flat for over 40 years while education spending has increased 140%. Though this is Texas, I have seen similar data for other states.

 At the national level, federal government educational spending has skyrocketed, with no comparable improvement in educational outcomes.

 Clearly, the data debunk the supposition that more money is needed to fix education. What about changing standards and curricula? What have we got to show for all the reforms in the last 40 years such as Head Start, New Math, Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, Next Generation Science Standards, and Common Core?

Could it be that we are trying to apply right answers to the wrong problems? If money, revised standards and curricula, and high-stakes testing are not the real problems, what is?

I think the real problem is that students generally lack learning competencies. Amazingly, schools tell students more about what to learn than how to learn. I think that such schooling has it backwards. In my view, the main goal of school should be to motivate students to learn and to teach them how to do it. Good schooling also ought to cultivate good academic taste, that is, the ability to distinguish principle from fact, useful information from trivia, logical analysis from specious argumentation, and intellectual excellence from superstition, myth, and falsehood. With that accomplished most everything else will fall into place.

What do I mean by "learning competencies?" In this post, I will just identify the competencies needed for effective learning as follows:

Organization

Understanding

Synthesis

Memory

Application

Creativity

In a follow-on post, I will explain what I think teachers can do to promote student development of these learning competencies. The corollary is that Colleges of Education need to be doing more research on these competencies and provide more instruction to pre-service teachers on how to teach learning competencies. In short, what is the smart way to address the real problem in education?

Dr. Klemm has a new book, Mental Biology, The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. See review: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/mental-biology-klemm

Echoic memory

It is sensory memory for auditory information. When people hear something, echoic memory makes an auditory image or recording of that sound and stores it briefly. Pure sounds can be held for brief intervals to help auditory perception

This recording called an echo. Echoes have a much longer duration than visual icons. Echoes last up to 2 seconds after ears stop hearing the sound.

Echoic memory is widely believed to play a role in language processing, perhaps to help retain exact replicas of sounds during sentence and word processing.

Researchers discovered that the length of echoic memory increases as children grow into adults.

The processing of information persisting as echoic memory is called ‘feature extraction’.

An important aspect of this kind of processing is that the auditory information being processed gets organized in a very basic way.
Echoic memory

Jazz Changes the Brain

To follow up my prior post on jazz, I just read a scientific report published last week that suggests that training of musical creativity in jazz causes long-lasting changes in brain function. In this study, musicians completed a questionnaire that allowed researchers to know the extent of each subject's prior classical and jazz training. Functional MRI brain scans were taken with subjects lying down on their back with a piano keyboard on their lap, playing improvisations with their right hand. Ear phones allowed players to hear their improvisations.

Brain scan showed distinct activity differences in the jazz musicians and that difference was greater in those with longer jazz histories. Past improvisation experience increased the functional bilateral connectivity of the dorsal premotor cortex, the pre-supplemental motor areas of cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Decreased activity connectivity was noted in executive control frontal-parietal areas. Thus, it would seem that creativity training, in jazz at least, changes the brain at a network level. Presumably, these connectivity changes were created by past histories in learning jazz and no doubt facilitated improvisation by automating some of the neural functions needed to perform it.

How do we interpret the decreased activity in executive-control areas of cortex? Multiple other brain-scan studies in other contexts have indicated that as a brain becomes proficient in a certain task, apparently less neural tissue is needed to perform the task. Decreased activity can therefore indicate task mastery.
Scientists have known for a decade or more that learning and memory in general change both brain anatomy and function. Such changes are typically linked to the neural requirements for performing specific kinds of tasks. This study of classical and jazz musicians follows on prior studies showing that musical training does change the brain. For example, violin players have enhanced neural activity in the motor cortex controlling hand movements. The relative size of the left and right motor cortex differs between piano and string players.

The importance of this present study is that it demonstrates that the brain change depends on the kind of musical training and appears to be selective for improvisation. Moreover, musical improvisational training affects more than just control over movements and extends to cognitive functions needed to improvise. Improvisation is a creative act that apparently recruits cortical circuits to support it and in the process rewires the brain to facilitate improvisation.

Improvisation relies heavily on memory of previously learned musical patterns and implementation strategies. Jazz players call this "musical vocabulary." Thus, jazz players have to become musicians first, then learn how to improvise. Because memory is a "process in a population, not a thing in a place," neural representation of musical vocabulary is probably widely distributed, and the brain must learn how to recruit connections from multiple brain areas and integrate them in real time in the prefrontal and movement-control parts of the brain, which apparently generate creative ideas and implement them.


Source:

Pinho, A. L. et al. (2014) Connecting to create: expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased functional connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas. J. Neuroscience. 34 (18): 6156-6163. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769.13-2014.

                         Memory Medic has a new book being distributed by Random House: 

                         Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate.

Visual memory of iconic memory

There are three types of sensory memory:
*Iconic memory
*Echoic memory
*Haptic memory

Iconic memory is the sensory memory for visual stimuli. A very common example for iconic memory is the light beam that for example a pocket lamp leaves behind when it is moved rapidly through the dark night.

The apparently real light beam is only created by the images one retrieves and stores in the sensory memory while the pocket lamp moves.

Icons do not last long, As soon as human see the object, an icon is formed and it last for only about half a second before it decays.

The iconic image of the image registered on the retina just before a movement may persist long enough to enable human to see the events in their visual environment without interruption.

Without iconic memory, human visions would perhaps consist of s series of flashes.

Iconic memory is the initial stage in an information-processing model. Although highly transient, it has a large capacity.
Visual memory of iconic memory

The concept of sensory memory

Traditionally, memory researchers have distinguished between two types of transient memories: sensory memories and short term memories.

Sensory memories are faithful, veridical records of initiating stimuli. It is a memory system for storing sensory information for a very short period of time, ranging from a fraction of a second to as long as three or four seconds.

Visual, auditory, and other memory stimuli constantly strike human sensory receptors, forming impressions body briefly hold in sensory memory in a kind of temporary storing device called a sensory register.

The sensory impression then disappears and is replaced by the next one.

Sensory memory keeps the person from being overwhelmed by too many incoming stimuli because any sensory information of not attend to will vanish in seconds. Most stimuli that register sensory memory are lost before they reach short – or long term memory.
The concept of sensory memory

Process of memory retrieval

The three primary components of memory are encoding, storage and retrieval.

Retrieval refers to the processes involved when one accesses information that has been stored in long term memory. It is the process bringing information to mind.

Retrieving long–held information is one of the marvels of the human brain. Though some memories seem to be retrieved effortlessly, others depend in using certain clues, called retrieval cues, to help jog them into awareness. 

Retrieval cues are stimuli associated with situation in which memories were originally formed.

There are two patterns of memory retrieval:
*Recall versus recognition
*Serial position effects

Retrieval actually involves two types of processes: a spontaneous, automatic process that brings information into consciousness and a controlled, strategic process that guides a search for information.

The brain is capable of handling several retrieval procedures in parallel at any given time. Despite its complexity, most of long term activation and retrieval is automatic and nearly instantaneous.
Process of memory retrieval

Long Term Memory

Although the brain quickly purges most unimportant short term memory, it stores the important ones – those that are emotionally compelling or personally meaningful.

That stored information is long term memory. It is the total of what you know: a compendium of data ranging from name, address, and phone number and the names of friends and relatives to more complex information, such as the sounds and images of events that happened decades ago.

It also includes the routines information you use every day, like how to make coffee, operate your computer and carry out all the intricate behavioral sequences involves in performing your job or running your household.

Your long-term memory and short-term memory are not distinguished merely by how long the memories last.

Another difference is the amount of information the brain can handle. Although the brain can juggle only a relatively small number of short term memories at a time, it can store a virtually unlimited number of long term memories.

Barring disease or injury, you can always learn and retain something new. Furthermore, long term memories are less fragile that short term memories, which means they’re not lost when something interrupts your train of thought.

Previously learned long term memories even tend to remain intact in the early stages of dementia, when patients have trouble learning new information.
Long Term Memory