Suggestions for Improving memory

Suggestions for Improving Memory

Researchers offer several suggestions for improving memory. Let's suppose that you have to take a test that will require you to regurgitate, at least in part, declarative information. 

• Practice overlearning. Researchers suggest that you repeat declarative information in timed intervals, over and over again until you've memorized it. And have that memorizing finished a week before you're scheduled to take the test. Seven days prior to the test, practice what researchers call oeverlearning, which means continually reexposing yourself to the information you've already memorized. Do it over and over again in spaced intervals.
• Don't pull all-nighters. A great deal of information processing occurs at night.
• Don't cram. Research also shows that regularly timed exposures stretched over a period of days creates learning far superior to cramming for an exam a day before you take it. Let's say that you only have 10 times to study for a test. The memory is much more robust if you studied once a day for 10 days rather than do 100 exposures the day, the night, the hour before you take the exam.

There are many other tricks you can use to help your brain limp past its Serengeti heritage, from doing something we call elaborative rehearsal to mnemonic strategies to using mental imagery.

If you dig down deeper into human memory, things get very complicated fast. Memory is not like a camera on a cell phone. Photo by Elena.

Anxiety Disorders and CBT

Anxiety Disorders and CBT

We need information repeated on a regular basis to memorize something solidly. It's the intimate hallmark of how we learn. It may even shed some insight on certain mental disorders commonly experienced such as anxiety disorders.

Phobias afflict many people. We believe that people who suffer from anxiety disorders such as phobias are victims of an overacting fire-together/wire-together tendency in their brains.

In the middle of the last century, Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis developed a type of psychotherapy that uses this fire-together/wire-together tendency as a weapon against anxiety disorders. It's called cognitive behavior therapy (CBT). The assumption behind CBT is that what you think governs what you feel.

For example, if you have a phobia of dogs, you have negative automatic thoughts about dogs (that's the thinking part), so when you see one, anxiety is generated (that's the feeling part), To have those anxious feelings go away, you first have to attack their source: your negative thinking. CBT calls this faulty thinking.

The therapy teaches you to entertain other not-so-self-defeating ways of looking at dogs. CBT does not ask you to block out the fearful feelings. You couldn't; they're wired. It does challenge you to start thinking consistently of alternative choices of viewing a tough aversive subject. You need to make it a habit.

If you successfully challenge faulty thinking on a regular basis, the faulty thinking eventually goes away. Research shows that applied consistently, the anxiety also goes away – and of its own accord,

When done consistently in the hands of a trained therapist, CBT is a potent weapon. Research shows that it's amongst the most effective therapies for anxiety disorders that exist. It's also helpful for depression and bipolar disorder, and even certain types of schizophrenia are responsive.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina).

Genetics play a large role in determining intelligence, and both nature and nurture influence complex human behavior. We have yet to untangle the relative contributions of each to intelligence.

Theory of Mind

Theory of Mind

Symbolic reasoning is the ability to realize that one thing might actually stand for something else – that a logo, a sound or even the small pushes of a button may imply another thing entirely. Symbolic reasoning is so pervasive that it's possible to miss it. But it plays hardball with the rest of the plans. It may be the one thing that separates us from every other animal.

Symbolic reasoning is in the bones of artistic expression. It lies at the heart of advanced toolmaking. It's the brains behind mathematics. It's at the center of our language abilities, spoken or written. It's the ability to impute to something a series of characteristics that something does not intrinsically possess.

The sophistication of our symbolic reasoning may be the answer to the question of what separates us from animals. We speak uniquely because we can reason uniquely. But where did we get the ability to reason symbolically, to impute to something characteristics we cannot otherwise observe?

There is no end of speculation, but many researchers agree that social interaction is involved – perhaps as a direct result of our wimpiness. These researchers invoke something called a false belief test as an illustration.

There are many variations of the false belief test, but one is sometimes referred to as the Sally-Anne test. It shows that small children believe their perspective is everybody's perspective. After age four, however, children somehow realize that other people can have perspectives different from their own. The core cognitive gadget is that they have begun to virtualize a perception. 

The ability to understand the mental world of someone else requires the ability to virtualize, to imagine. If you can hold in your head something that isn't physically there, impute to something a series of characteristics not readily perceived, you are on the way toward uncoupling the signifier from the signified. This is the left ventricle of symbolic reasoning. Symbolic reasoning also uncouples the signifier from the signified.

This ability to understand the motivations and intentions of another person is called theory of mind. Although it's a complex concept, theory of mind has two major components: the ability to understand the rewards and punishment systems inside someone's else's head and the ability to understand the the rewards and punishment systems inside your head are not the same as another's, But that person won't react like you do; they react like they do.

Many researchers think that the false belief test measures aspects of theory of mind. Some think that theory of mind and symbolic reasoning dip their feet into the same cognitive pool.

It may seem odd, but there may be a direct link between our ability to understand each other and our ability to understand Shakespeare – and physics. Tucked into this linkage is a bombshell of an idea, an idea that has deep practical significance. It means that the things that make us human come directly from the things that make us relational.

(From Your Best Brain, Course Guidebook, by Professor John J. Medina)

Some animals coordinate their behaviors with ease. Picture by Elena.

Power of Social Media

Power of Social Media – and Business! 

Recently we have been seeing this unprecedented upsurge in the online sales and distribution market. With the emergence of technology and the internet, most of the processes have become convenient now.

With the advent of social media, the business market has been able to take a huge leap and invest in social media sites for businesses. The social websites have been coming up with these innovative communicational features which leave you relieved as well as stunned the same time. They have colossally contributed to redefining the word 'Marketing' by large. 

The social media platforms are no more for fun and chatting only - they have been quite constructively utilized for business purposes of almost all types. Great marketing strategies over social media can bring remarkable success to your business, creating excellent brand recognition, building B2C relationships and help you develop a network.

Let’s take a look at some of the monumental social media websites which are fantastical underneath the welcome page! 

Facebook: Facebook is an excellent social networking site which was founded in 2004 as communication platform. This was developed with a purpose to connect the students of Harvard with one another through a common communication platform. Today, Facebook is the most influential social network with very innovative interactive features and options. People make use of those features for miscellaneous purposes. The platform has come in handy as the business industry conducts massive marketing activities over this platform.

LinkedIn: LinkedIn is one of the more professional social networking sites. LinkedIn Groups is a great venue for entering into a professional dialog with people in similar industries and allows a place to share content with like-minded individuals. It's also great for posting jobs and general employee networking.

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Dont' worry, I've thought of everything (famous last words). Social Media is like a torch in the night. Illustration by Megan Jorgensen.

Instagram: Instagram is a photo and video sharing platform, currently owned by Facebook, Inc. It was created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and launched in October 2010 exclusively on iOS. As the further innovations were introduced in the platform, people also saw the opportunities as to how to constructively utilize the available communicational resources for their business purposes. 

YouTube: As we all know, Youtube is a free video sharing website which was launched in 2005. It is the most popular site over the internet in regards to video sharing platforms. People now have utilized even this platform to use it for their respective purposes. There are huge marketing and advertisement campaigns being run over it by worldwide recognized brands. 

It’s just great how these platforms have been built up by brilliant people keeping in mind all the constructive objectives. They’re remarkable examples of ingenuity and milestones accomplished by people. Jobs which are usually performed by specific websites such as Geebo, eBay, DomesticSale, IGO, Daraz.pk etc – can also be performed over these platforms through their various innovative features developed for masses' absolute convenience. We hope to see more substantial innovations in coming days catering to people’s respective objectives with brilliant resourceful aptness.

Long-Term Memory

Importance of Long-Term Memory

The importance of long-term memory to thought cannot be overemphasized. One of the earliest examples of its significance is still one of the best. In the 1930s, Sir Frederic Bartlett had people listen to folktales from foreign countries and later asked them to recount the stories. Not surprisingly, he found that these unfamiliar stories were not remembers very accurately. What was surprising was that the errors of recall were not random but were quite systematic. The subjects often rewrote the stories in their own minds, espcially parts that were particularly foreign to them, revising the plot to the point where it resembled a more familiar Western narrative.

To explain his findings, Bartlett proposed that “Remembering is... an imaginative reconstruction, or construction, built out of the relation of our attitude towards a whole active mass of past experiences.” He concluded that when we face a problem, we draw upon mental schemata, organized bundles of stored knowledge. For example, if you are asked a question about how baseball is played, you would draw upon a baseball schema, your collective knowledge of baseball obtained from specific direct experiences you've heard or read about baseball. Barlett's findings do not just concern the personal, idiosyncratic, and fallible nature of memory, but also emphasize how long-term memories, when retrieved into the temporary workspace of working memory, can guide our thoughts and actions, as well.

It has been known for centuries that we can only keep a few things active in our minds (in working memory) at once. George Miller, one of the pioneers in cognitive psychology, figured out, through psychological experiments, that the magic number is about seven pieces of information. Some people can hang on to eight or nine, whereas others manage only five, but, on average, temporary storage can hold about seven times. (It's probably no coincidence that telephone numbers within an area code were designed to have seven digits). But, as Miller noted, we can effectively expand that capacity by chunking or grouping information – it's about as easy to remember seven letters as seven words or ideas. No doubt one of the reasons human cognition is so powerful is because we have language in our brains, which exponentially increases the ability to categorize information, to chunk. A whole culture, for instance, can be implied by a name.

Damage to the frontal lobe interferes with the ability to plan and execute goal-directed behavior. Frontal lobes are involved in executive functions (planning, problem-solving, and behavioral control), as well as in short-term or temporary memory. Illustration by Elena.

The concept of working memory subsumes what used to be called short-term memory. But as the term workspace implies, working memory is more than just an area for temporary storage. It underlies mental work. As Minsky noted, thinking involves juggling of mental items – comparing, contrasting, judging, predicting. It is the job of the executive functions of working memory to do the juggling.

In the spirit of viewing the mind in terms of computer-like operations, some cognitive scientists like Time Shallice and Phillip Johnson-Laird have referred to executive functions as supervisory or operating system functions. A computer operation system is responsible for controlling the flow of information processing, moving information from permanent memory (ROM) to a central processing unit with active memory (RAM), scheduling tasks to performed using the active memory, and so on. Similarly, executive functions are involved in the constant updating of temporary memory, selecting which specialized systems to work with (pay attention to) at the moment, and then moving relevant information into the workspace from long term storage by retrieving specific memories or activating schemata pertinent to the immediate situation. Through executive functions, specialized systems are also directed to attend to certain specific stimuli and to ignore others, depending on what working memory is working on. In complex tasks involving multiple kinds of mental activities, executive functions plan the sequence of mental steps and schedule the participation of the different activities, switching the focus of attention between activities as needed.” Executive functions are crucially involved in decision-making, allowing you to choose between different courses of action given what is happening in the present, what you know about such situations, and what you can expect to happen if you do different things in this particular situation. Executive functions, in short, make practical thinking and reasoning possible.

The executive represents a powerful mental capacity, but is not all-powerful. Like the workspace, it has its limits. It basically can do one or at most a few things at a time, this is why you forget a phone number if you are distracted while dialing. With practice and training, we can learn to divide our attention between two mental tasks simultaneously, but only with difficulty. In this sense, the executive is more like an old-fashioned DOS operation system that can only run one program at a time than like a multitasking Windows operation system that can concurrently run word processing, spreadsheet, e-mail, calendar and other programs.

But there's also a sort of chunking that takes place in executive functions. As we've seen, the executive is involved in scheduling the sequence of steps in a complex task. Here, the executive is doing more than one thing at a time, but the things are all related to the overall goal. If the executive has to work on multiple unrelated goals at the same time, however, the system begins to fall apart, especially if the goals conflict with one another. An easy way to stress people is to make them do too much at once. Planning, decision-making, and other aspects of mental life suffer when the executive is overloaded. Working memory has come to be thought of as a function of neural circuits in the frontal lobes. 

(From Synaptic Self. How Our Brains Become Who We Are. Joseph LeDoux (author of The Emotional Brain).

Neural activity, as measured with devices such as PET and MRI scans, increases in the frontal cortex when humans perform tasks that require temporary storage and executive functions. Photograph by Elena.