Tag Archives: learning

February 7, 2023 · 11:36 pm

Tuning into brainwave rhythms speeds up learning in adults …

Scientists have shown for the first time that briefly tuning into a person’s individual brainwave cycle before they perform a learning task dramatically boosts the speed at which cognitive skills improve.

Calibrating rates of information delivery to match the natural tempo of our brains increases our capacity to absorb and adapt to new information, according to the team behind the study.

University of Cambridge researchers say that these techniques could help us retain “neuroplasticity” much later in life and advance lifelong learning.

“Each brain has its own natural rhythm, generated by the oscillation of neurons working together,” said Prof Zoe Kourtzi, senior author of the study from Cambridge’s Department of Psychology. “We simulated these fluctuations so the brain is in tune with itself – and in the best state to flourish.”

“Our brain’s plasticity is the ability to restructure and learn new things, continually building on previous patterns of neuronal interactions. By harnessing brainwave rhythms, it may be possible to enhance flexible learning across the lifespan, from infancy to older adulthood,” Kourtzi said.

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Tagged as aging, brain, learning, neuroplasticity

February 6, 2019 · 3:47 am

What’s my life purpose?

This is such a lovely post, I wanted to share it with you

Thriving Under Pressure

Who am I? Why was I born?

C646382C-A029-4610-8E72-8DF0E3632582 So many people in this world are struggling with what to do with their lives.

An existential struggle that did not exist 100 years ago when jobs were more clearly defined.

Thank Which is why it is essential to explore life purpose in many different ways.

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PURPOSE 🆚 JOB

We must not confuse life purpose with occupation.

My occupation = Psychology Professor.

My life purpose is to lift people up and help them feel better.

Something I can do on weekends, at work, with friends, in my community, and well into my retirement years.

Our occupation transpires 9-5. Our life purpose unfolds 24/7.

Life Purpose Discussions – Everywhere!

The topic of finding one’s life purpose was an active discussion on social media (see screen shot below) and in psychology class (link to video) this week.

Social Media: What’s my gift?

This is…

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Tagged as happiness, inspiration, learning, passion, Positive Psychology, Positivity

July 11, 2018 · 12:03 am

Exercise Creates Optimal Brain State for Mastering New Motor Skills

As I have said numerous times here, I love it when fresh news meets my bias. The one I am thinking about is how physical exercise benefits brain function. You can check out my post – Can exercise help me to learn? And, don’t forget my Page – Important facts about your brain – and exercise benefits.

Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

If you want to learn to walk a tightrope, it’s a good idea to go for a short run after each practice session. That’s because a recent study in NeuroImage demonstrates that exercise performed immediately after practicing a new motor skill improves its long-term retention. More specifically, the research shows, for the first time, that as little as a single fifteen-minute bout of cardiovascular exercise increases brain connectivity and efficiency. It’s a discovery that could, in principle, accelerate recovery of motor skills in patients who have suffered a stroke or who face mobility problems following an injury. Continue reading →

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April 20, 2018 · 12:02 am

Sweat – Don’t Forget: Exercise Breaks Improve Learning

It is becoming clearer to me with every day that passes – exercise is the key to a better life. Everyone understands the first level – that our bodies crave movement. But new research continues to unearth fresh benefits for our bodies globally. Every aspect of our life and being tends to benefit from exercise. Just scroll back through this blog at the last 10 posts and you will find one after the other example of this.

New research from a team of scientists at McMaster University suggests that brief exercise breaks during lectures can help university students focus their attention, retain information and improve overall learning.

While the benefits of exercise are well-known for school-aged children, this is the first study to examine the benefits for adult students. The findings are published online in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

For the study, researchers examined three groups of first-year Introductory Psychology students, who were tasked with watching a 50-minute online lecture. One cohort performed a series of brief, calisthenic exercises at regular breaks during the lecture, another took breaks but played a video game, and a final group did not take any break. Continue reading →

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August 12, 2017 · 12:07 am

Deep sleep reinforces the learning of new motor skills

I would like to remind you that I am a strong proponent of a good night’s sleep. Check out my Page – How important is a good night’s sleep? for more information.

Medical Press reports the following:

The benefits of a good night’s sleep have become widely known, and now neuroscientists at UC San Francisco have discovered that the animal brain reinforces motor skills during deep sleep.

During non-REM sleep, slow brain waves bolster neural touchpoints that are directly related to a task that was newly learned while awake, while weakening neural links that are not, the researchers found.

Credit: University of California, San Francisco

“This phenomenon may be related to the notion of ‘extracting the gist’ of how to perform a novel task,” said Karunesh Ganguly, MD, PhD, associate professor of neurology. “Sleep appears to reduce neural activity that is not related to a task we are in the process of learning.”

Having a better handle on the mechanics of how sleep affects learning could lead to new medical stimulation devices, and consumer-driven wearable devices, or “electroceuticals,” which stimulate brain cells and improve learning as we snooze. Devices from some startups are headed in that direction, but so far they are designed to stimulate the brain while we are awake.

Mind Control

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Tagged as learning

July 10, 2017 · 12:05 am

Controlling Memory By Triggering Specific Brain Waves During Sleep – IBS

Have you ever tried to recall something just before going to sleep and then wake up with the memory fresh in your mind? While we absorb so much information during the day consciously or unconsciously, it is during shut eye that a lot of facts are dispatched to be filed away or fall into oblivion. A good quality sleep is the best way to feel mentally refreshed and memorize new information, but how is the brain working while we sleep? Could we improve such process to remember more, or maybe even use it to forget unwanted memories?

I would just like to add that my Page – How important is a good night’s sleep? includes further information on how the brain benefits from good sleep habits.

Scientists at the Center for Cognition and Sociality, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), enhanced or reduced mouse memorization skills by modulating specific synchronized brain waves during deep sleep. This is the first study to show that manipulating sleep spindle oscillations at the right timing affects memory. The full description of the mouse experiments, conducted in collaboration with the University of Tüebingen, is published in the journal Neuron.

The research team concentrated on a non-REM deep sleep phase that generally happens throughout the night, in alternation with the REM phase. It is called slow-wave sleep and it seems to be involved with memory formation, rather than dreaming. Continue reading →

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Tagged as a good night’s sleep, brain health, learning, sleep

June 27, 2016 · 11:54 am

Of cats and dogs and cliches …

I was reading this morning and ran into the cliche you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. I have to tell you that this is one particularly annoying expression to me. This is another of the general negativity directed toward seniors.

By the time I retired, I had become something of an expert on markets. After 20 years spent writing about international markets for Reuters News Service I went on to write for the Investments Department of a major philanthropic organization. The final five years of my working life I actually managed the investment of $900 million in the debt market.

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?

After retiring, at the age of 60, I started writing this blog. It had nothing to do with markets or the economy. The primary focus was weight loss in the beginning, but after taking a number of courses on nutrition, anatomy, physiology, the brain, longevity and yoga, to name a few, I expanded the scope to focus on good nutrition, exercise and living past 100 while keeping our mental faculties intact.

So, I contend that you can teach an old dog, me, new tricks. I think that you need to cleanse yourself of cliches like that as they are absolutely negative and do nothing but jam a road block into your path of straight thinking.

While on the subject of negative cliches, another troubling one that springs to mind is curiosity killed the cat. I am not sure why, but I hear that one a lot. What’s wrong with being curious? Since when is curiosity a bad thing? I consider curiosity one of my best traits.

In researching the saying, it seems it started otherwise than we know it today. The original word was care not curiosity and the meaning had to do with care and worry, That is, too much worrying killed the cat. This varies from what we know today as curiosity – digging into a subject to find out more. So, it’s current usage has run totally askew from its origin. Yet it persists in this new and troublesome form.

Since many of my readers are fellow bloggers, you know how much a part that true curiosity plays in your most meaningful posts. I certainly do.

Finally, we all know how important it is to avoid cliches, not just negative ones. Nothing bogs down writing faster and glazes over the eyes of a reader more effectively than cliche-ridden sentences. So, I beg you to avoid cliches like the plague.

You got that last one, didn’t you?

Tony

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May 9, 2016 · 4:45 am

Digital media may be changing how you think

New study finds users focus on concrete details rather than the big picture

As a big user of my iPad and iPhone for reading I was surprised to learn that they impacted my comprehension.

Tablet and laptop users beware. Using digital platforms such as tablets and laptops for reading may make you more inclined to focus on concrete details rather than interpreting information more abstractly, according to a new study published in the proceedings of ACM CHI ’16, the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, to be held May 7-12, 2016. The findings serve as another wake-up call to how digital media may be affecting our likelihood of using abstract thought.

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The research tested the basic question: would processing the same information on a digital versus non-digital platform affect “construal levels”– the fundamental level of concreteness versus abstractness that people use in perceiving and interpreting behaviors, events and other informational stimuli. In order to study the basic question of whether processing the same information on one platform or the other would trigger a different baseline “interpretive lens” or mindset that would influence construals of information, the research tried to hold as many factors as possible constant between the digital and non-digital platforms. Reading material and other content for the study for example, was published using the same print size and format in both the digital and non-digital (print) versions. The research was comprised of four studies that evaluated how information processing is affected by each platform. A total of more than 300 participants, ages 20 to 24 years old, took part in the studies, which were comprised of 60 to 100+ participants.

Reading comprehension and problem solving success were affected by the type of platform used. Highlights from the studies include the following:
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Tagged as brain, digital media, learning, understanding

March 17, 2016 · 12:05 pm

Can Exercise Help Me To Learn?

“Exercise helps you to learn on three levels: first, it optimizes your mind-set to improve alertness, attention and motivation; second, it prepares and encourages nerve cells to bind to one another, which is the cellular basis for logging in new information; and third, it spurs the development of new nerve cells from stem cells in the hippocampus,” so says Spark, the revolutionary new science of exercise and the brain. Author John J. Ratey, M.D., is a clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Besides, Spark, he also wrote A User’s Guide to the Brain among other books.

The hippocampus plays a major role in the consolidation of information from long term memory and short term memory. So, clearly, exercise plays an important role for seniors who are concerned about their memory failing in their latter years.

One distinction needs to be made here. You can’t learn difficult material while you are exercising because blood is shunted away from the prefrontal cortex and this hampers your executive function. Dr. Ratey quotes a study of college students who were working out on treadmills and exercise bikes at a high rate. They performed poorly on tests of complex learning. “However blood flow shifts back almost immediately after you finish exercising, and this is the perfect time to focus on a project that demands sharp thinking and complex analysis.”

He enumerates an experiment that was done on 40 adults aged 50 to 64. They were asked to do one 35 minute treadmill session at either 60 percent or 70 percent of maximum heart rate. Afterwards, they were asked to list alternative uses for common objects, like a newspaper. It is used for reading, but can be used to wrap fish, line a bird cage, etc. Half of the group watched a movie and the other half exercised. They were tested three times, before the session, immediately after the session and then 20 minutes later. The results of the movie watchers showed no change, but the runners improved their processing speed and cognitive flexibility after just one session. “Cognitive flexibility is an important executive function that reflects our ability to shift thinking and to produce a steady flow of creative thoughts and answers as opposed to a regurgitation of the usual responses. The trait correlates with high performance levels in intellectually demanding jobs.” The doctor recommends going for a short, intense run at lunchtime ahead of an important brain-storming session at work.

I have enjoyed Dr. Ratey’s book and recommend it to readers of the blog. You can get a look at the book on the Amazon website and purchase it from there if you like it.

As regular readers know, I lost an aunt to Alzheimer’s and my mother suffered from dementia in her final years. I am a total believer in this exercise-learning hypothesis. If I don’t ride my bike every day, I manage a five mile walk, climb 30 flights of stairs, or take a trip to the health club. I ain’t sittin’ around doin’ nothin’.

I have repeated the phrase, Use it or Lose it time and again in this blog. In this case, using the body promotes healthy mental processes as well as good physical results.

Tony

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Tagged as aging, brain, Exercise, John J. Ratey, learning, Spark, weight

November 11, 2015 · 5:40 am

Listening to Music can Help and Hinder Learning – Infographic

When I was younger I always had music playing no matter what I was doing. Now that I am an old man, I still love music, but I don’t play it when I am writing blog posts or doing things that require concentration.

It’s nice to know that it lowers blood pressure and reduces stress.

How about you?

Tony

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April 24, 2015 · 12:07 am

How the Brain Benefits from Exercise – Infographic

I feel strongly that the importance of exercise to the brain is largely overlooked in the world of fitness. The following are from just 20 minutes of exercise.

To read much more on this, check out my Page – Important Facts About Your Brain (and Exercise Benefits).

Tony

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Tagged as brain, creativity, Exercise, learning, memory

April 4, 2012 · 7:15 pm

Can Exercise Help Me To Learn?

I have enjoyed Dr. Ratey’s book and recommend it to readers of the blog. You can get a look at the book on the Amazon website and purchase it from there if you like it.

I have repeated the phrase, Use it or Lose it time and again in this blog. In this case, using the body promotes healthy mental processes as well as good physical results.

Tony