You have heard the saying, Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.

Teach him
how to fish and he will eat for a lifetime. Well, when it comes to education, we
commonly feed our children cold dead-fish curricula, which they mostly soon for
get. The problem is not so much the curriculum as that it is too often delivered
at the expense of teaching students how to learn on their own and become lifeti
me learners. What a lot of them do learn is to shun learning and even hate schoo
l enough to drop out.
Fads come and go in education. There was new math. Then it was the self-esteem mov
ement. There is the recent heavy emphasis on hands-on learning. Now the whole educ
ational enterprise is obsessed with high-stakes testing.
None of these things are bad in themselves. It is just that they disturb educati
onal balance and emphasize teaching students WHAT to learn as opposed to WANT to
learn and HOW to learn.
The body politic still insists we need to throw more money at education and that
will fix things. Numerous studies show a lack of correlation between per pupil
funding and educational achievement. The school district that spends the most, W
ashington, D.C., has the poorest educational achievement. Politicians and educat
ors want more money. These are the same folks who think the cure for the federal
deficit is to incur more debt so we can stimulate the economy. They don t see the s
tructural problems that are the real causes for economic stagnation. Likewise, t
hey don t see the real causes of educational stagnation.
Consider this: in terms of inflation adjusted dollars for education, there has b
een a drastic increase in spending on education in recent years, with very littl
e evident benefit. As for spending on education, see chart below.
But I recently had an experience suggesting that teachers in the trenches do get
it. I gave a presentation on Feb. 28 at the Texas Middle School Teachers Associa
tion meeting. My session was in a time slot that competed with eight other prese
ntations, yet every chair in my room was taken, while the other sessions had rel
atively few attendees. It s not that I am a celebrity. These teachers didn t know wh
o I am. But they did relate to my topic, Teach Students How to Remember What You
Teach. [1] (link is external) I gave the same talk again an hour later and expecte
d few to attend because I assumed that most teachers who were interested in this
topic attended the first session. But in the second session, also competing aga
inst eight others, the room was again filled and teachers were bringing in chair
s from other rooms.
Experienced teachers know that our schools neglect cognitive development. That s p
sychology talk for teaching kids how to learn, remember, and think. I have been
teaching first-semester college freshmen the last couple of years, and it is app
arent that these students have a conspicuous lack of cognitive development, even
though my university is highly selective in its admissions. Most of the freshme
n lack strategy and tactics for learning and memory. Analytical and creative thi
nking are typically superficial.
I am doing what I can to help students learn how to learn and remember. Until my
recent experience, I doubted that educational policy makers were interested. Ma
ybe now there s hope.
_
f you ve followed this blog from its beginnings in 2009, you ll know that it s covered
a wide territory. From initial interests in developmental psychology (I started
it when I was coming out of a period of close scrutiny of my own daughter s psych
ological development), the focus has moved on to the science of autobiographical
memory: the memories we have for the events of our own lives. Among other thing
s, I ve looked at lifelong links between language and memory, medieval techniques
for memory enhancement, and the social factors that shape memory in childhood.

In all of these inquiries one thing has been clear to me. To understand autobiog
raphical memory in its full richness, you need to get at it from the inside: as
a subjective experience, as well as something that can be studied in the psychol
ogy or neuroscience lab. You need to ask what having a memory is like, and not b
e satisfied with purely objective descriptions of the phenomenon. Here's how I p
ut it in my book, Pieces of Light (link is external) (published in the US tomorr
ow):
There is, of course, more to remembering than neural systems. I think that i
f we are really to unpick the mysteries of memory, we need to put the story back
into the science. One of my aims in this book is to capture the first-person na
ture of memory, the rememberer s capacity to reinhabit the recalled moment and exp
erience it again from the inside. The great memory scientist Endel Tulving calle
d this quality of memory autonoetic consciousness , and explaining it is one of the
biggest challenges for memory researchers. The scientific need for replicable e
xperimental findings has meant that the personal, subjective quality of memory h
as often been ignored, although this tendency has begun to be redressed in recen
t years, with a new movement towards exploring the qualitative and the narrative
. Memory researchers now spend more time getting to know their participants indiv
idual stories, whether they concern the beguiling confabulations spun by those w
hose memory systems have failed them, or the sensually rich first memories produce
d when people are interviewed about their very early childhoods. I want to do th
e same thing, letting the stories speak for themselves in illustrating the fragi
le and complex truths of memory. [amazon 0062237896]
These are some of the reasons why, to my mind, the study of memory requires a mu
ltidisciplinary perspective. A theme that emerged for me when I was writing Piec
es of Light was that many of the current issues for the cognitive neuroscience o
f autobiographical memory have been prefigured by the insights of writers and ar
tists. I read Marcel Proust on the power of the senses to trigger memories (link
is external) and discovered that he wasn't as much of a pioneer in this matter as
some have suggested. For example, the author Kenneth Grahame (link is external)
prefigured Proust's observation in his children's classic Wind in the Willows,
published several years before Proust's work. As the author Richard Holmes has p
ointed out1, if Mole's experience isn't a Proustian madeleine moment, it's hard
to imagine what is:
It was one of those mysterious fairy calls from out of the void that suddenl
y reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its v
ery familiar appeal, while as yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He
stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts
to recover the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly mov
ed him.
In the writings of the novelist A. S. Byatt (link is external), I found subtle p
henomenological distinctions (link is external) among kinds of early memory. I a
lso found clues to the fragmentary nature of early memory in the recollections o
f the painter Georgia O'Keeffe (link is external):
My first memory is of the brightness of light light all around. I was sitting
among pillows on a quilt on the ground very large white pillows. The quilt was a c
otton patchwork of two different kinds of material white with very small red stars
spotted over it quite close together, and black with a red and white flower on
it. I was probably eight or nine months old2.
This very early memory counts as an example of what researchers now call 'fragme
nt memories': isolated bits of memory that lack full autobiographical context, a
nd which may constitute nothing more than a feeling or an image.

With their preoccupations with characters' motivations and feelings, novelists a

re particularly helpful in showing how emotion shapes and reshapes memory. The m
ain protagonist in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending (link is external) find
s that his changing emotions about his former lover's parents trigger new memori
es of their relationship (link is external). Phenomena like this fit with scient
ific theory but have not yet been brought into the lab. Researchers looking for
insights into how memory works will find that time spent reading fiction is time
well spent.
I m not the first to recognise the value of artistic perspectives in understanding
memory. One book I always recommend on this topic is Daniel L. Schacter's Searc
hing for Memory (link is external), which contains many thoughtful meditations o
n how memory phenomena have been depicted in works of visual art. Artists themse
lves are drawing on research in cognitive neuroscience in shaping their explorat
ions of how individuals are defined by and define their memories. To give one ex
ample, London-based artist Shona Illingworth worked closely with cognitive neuro
scientist Martin A. Conway in creating her piece The Watch Man (link is external
), in which a traumatized mind struggles to reassemble fragments of its past.
It is one thing to draw on literary and artistic works to illustrate memory phen
omena; it is another to claim that their careful study can actually enrich the s
cience. In the realms of academia, just such multidisciplinary approaches are be
ginning to bear fruit. In the 2011 book The Memory Process (link is external), c
ontributors from psychology, neuroscience, and the humanities explore how advanc
es in neuroscience can enrich the study of artworks, and vice versa. From co-edi
tor Suzanne Nalbantian's introduction: '[Paul] Ricoeur, a philosopher of hermene
utics and literary theory, predicted that the overriding orientation of neurosci
ence in the future would be to juxtapose objective experimentally recorded activ
ities with the "incredible richness" of a "lived biology."'3. The challenge now
is for academics from different disciplines to work together in developing inter
disciplinary techniques for bringing this 'incredible richness' into the lab.
A similar ethos motivates the recently-established Memory Network (link is exter
nal), which brings together academics from the humanities and sciences along wit
h writers and artists to explore multidisciplinary connections among subjective
and objective conceptions of memory. In one recent project, for example, Londonbased neuroscientist Hugo Spiers (link is external) has been working with noveli
st Will Self (link is external) to scan the latter's brain as he navigates a vir
tual Soho (link is external).
Such activities promise to be useful in addressing aspects of the memory experie
nce that hard science has not yet found tractable: what exactly people are exper
iencing when they generate memories in the MRI scanner; the role of various inte
rconnected brain systems in generating the so-called 'feeling of remembering'; w
hich phenomenological changes in memory are involved in amnesia and normal agein
g; and so on. When I came to write about memory, it was quickly clear to me that
it had to be done by looking at memory from the inside: in terms of specific me
mories of specific events for specific people. Individuals and their narratives,
in other words. When we want to understand memory, it's helpful to start by tel
ling stories.
_
Pop a memory-enhancing pill and your friends will think you are sharp for your a
ge. They might even reduce your annoying forgetfulness. Sounds pretty good, righ
t?
Well, such pills, in crude form, are already here, and drug companies are feveri
shly trying to develop better pills. The current targets for memory-drug develop
ment are three neurotransmitter systems (dopamine, norepinephrine, acetylcholine
) and a couple of enzymes that activate genes involved in storing memory.

One effect of these neurotransmitters is to enhance attentiveness, which tends t

o deteriorate in the elderly. If you read my latest book, Memory Power 101 (avai
lable at Skyhorse.Publishing.com), you know that focused attention enhances info
rmation registration (encoding), which is the key to memory, because information
has to be encoded in brain before it can be remembered.
The original attention-enhancing drug is nicotine, which potentiates the acetylc
holine system. But this is also the basis for its bad side effects on heart rate
, blood pressure, and other visceral functions. However, there is a less hazardo
us acetylcholine enhancing drug, Aricept, which is used to reduce the symptoms o
f Alzheimer s disease. The benefit does not last, as the disease inevitably progre
sses beyond the point where Aricept s benefits work. There is not much evidence th
at the drug helps normal people to remember better.
Another currently available class of drugs acts to enhance dopamine and norepine
phrine transmitter systems. The best known example is amphetamine, notoriously u
sed by truck drivers to help stay awake. But amphetamine has way too many bad si
de effects, and has been replaced by Ritalin and Adderall. These drugs are. used
to help ADHD kids to focus, but many college students use these drugs to help t
heir memory. College students aren t the only ones taking these drugs to help memo
ry. A survey reported in Nature in 2008, showed that 20% of the more than 1,400
respondents took such drugs to improve their concentration. Over half of those d
id it daily or weekly. Nearly half of the subjects were over 35.
Another drug, modafinil, also acts to enhance dopamine and norepinephrine, but i
t also interacts with other chemical systems in the brain (histamine, orexin) th
at are involved in sleep. It also activates neural circuits that use glutamate a
s a neurotransmitter. Modafinil is marketed for treating excessive daytime sleep
iness and fatigue.
A newer class of drugs, known as ampakines, works by allowing more of the glutam
ate transmitter to enter nerve cells and stimulate them.
Currently, drug companies like Helicon, are feverishly working on drugs that aff
ect expression of memory genes. This is a completely new area of research, and w
e don t know much about how these memory genes (two have been identified, but only
one, CREB, has been studied much) act to form long-term memories. In one pre-cl
inical trial with monkeys, one CREB enhancer cut in half the time it took monkey
s to memorize tasks. A study of humans showed that a control group of people los
t about 20% of their memory of a list of 10 words a week later. But in a compara
ble test group, the CREB enhancer reduced this memory loss to only 2%.
How well these drugs work to improve memory depend on a person s already existing
memory abilities. People with good memories will get little benefit. This is cal
led a ceiling effect by researchers, because the closer your function already is t
o its maximum effectiveness, the harder it is for anything to boost performance.
Most of these drugs are hazardous in high concentrations. I already mentioned t
he well-known hazards of nicotine. Ritalin and Adderall are potentially addictiv
e, given that they are biochemically similar to amphetamine. High tissue concen
trations of glutamate is known to kill neurons. A similar consequence might occu
r from long-term continuous use even at lower doses of the glutamate enhancers m
odafinil and ampakines.
Memory pills will most likely become widely used as new and more effective compo
unds are discovered. People seek competitive advantage, especially in school and
information-dense jobs. Will this create a new drug culture?
There are psychological hazards. For example, memory enhancers might make you re
member too well. They would certainly aggravate post-traumatic stress syndrome.

Consider also that many ordinary life experiences need to be forgotten, lest the
y inappropriately continue to affect attitudes and behavior. It s like having a we
ll-learned song play over and over in your mind. That seems to drive one crazy,
and maybe real craziness could be triggered by powerful memory-enhancing drugs.
Evenwithout such dark consequences, very strong memories can make it difficult
to retrieve other memories, producing the commonly called tip-of-the-tongue recall
difficulty.
There are simpler and less problematic approaches to improving memory: namely, i
mprove learning strategies and use the established mnemonic principles and tacti
cs, as I have outlined in my books and blog posts at thankyoubrain.blogspot.com.
Besides, you can take more pride in intellectual achievement and being mentally
sharp when you have earned it.
_
Do you know what is essential for a good memory? The ability to forget. To compl
etely and thoroughly forget. Forgetting, like breathing or sleeping, is physiolo
gically normal. This is at odds with our modern compulsion to record and remembe
r everything and is a perfect recipe for anxiety.
Deb Roy, a cognitive science professor at MIT studying language, recorded 8-10 h
ours daily of the first three years of his son's home life. He compiled a quarte
r million hours of audio and video, creating a 200,000 gigabyte "ultimate memory
machine"(most PCs have a few gigabytes of memory). Consider how much informatio
n each of us is exposed to in 24 hours, on streets, subways, screens and in slee
p. Imagine recording and remembering all this. Thankfully, we were never meant t
o.
Fact: We are evolutionarily programmed to forget. Our brains evolved over millen
nia with built-in forgetfulness. Our brain is engineered to remember tastes, sme
lls, voices, touch and visions, not names. Our brain is engineered to solve prob
lems (How do we keep track of cattle? Mathematics; How do I communicate? Languag
e), not remember disjointed facts. A fact not linked to a sense, an emotion, or
a concept is quickly forgotten.
Upset that you didn't capture a moment forever, a missed smile, an exuberant wag
? A handful of people are human versions of Roy's memory machine. Jill Price, an
administrative worker in California, remembers every detail of every waking mom
ent of her life from age 14, a running video stream. But such amazing autobiogra
phical memory comes at a price. Remember the many cringe worthy moments of your
life? Jill is forced to endure them in real time.
She states, "I run my life through my head constantly and it is very exhausting.
.. like a split screen... intrusive... stuff that has tormented me through the y
ears... the decisions... always going back to it and remembering the exact momen
t when I did this... then this wouldn't have happened... put(ting) me in dire st
raits... that's why I reached out to the doctors... "
Although Jill doesn't ever forget a face or a name and flourishes at her job, sh
e still, like many of us, needs to take notes and use post-its and confesses to
finding school "difficult."
Why don't we replay happy memories as often? Fire burns, sharp edges cut, snakes
bite, heights are dangerous, bitter means poison. Perhaps memories of sorry eve
nts gave your ancestors the evolutionary edge in survival so that you can read (
and forget) this post.
But what is the harm in the extraordinary retention of facts?
Solomon Shereshevsky was a mnemonist, someone who so excelled in remembering tha
t he parlayed his skill into a profession. He astounded thousands in early twent

ieth century Russia, accurately memorizing random audience facts. He remembered

their names and details like place of origin of everyone in vast halls, in rever
se or random order, even from decades-old shows. Eventually, facts from earlier
performances began intruding, posing problems. He decided to forget this data bu
t couldn't. You see, Solomon had forgotten how to forget.
Frustrated, he imagined writing the unwanted facts on paper and setting it ablaz
e. However, Solomon's vivid powers of visualization, which served him so well in
remembering, now foiled his forgetting. He saw names glowing in the embers thro
ugh the burnt paper! Solomon eventually solved his dilemma by scribbling and era
sing information he wished to forget on a mental blackboard. In this way, he was
able to actively, consciously forget.
You may conclude Solomon was entertaining and successful, given his recall of en
tire books and even foreign language poems. On the contrary. Dr. Aleksandr Luria
, who studied him for three decades, found Solomon boring and noted his aimless
drifting from job to job. It is not a fantastic memory of facts that begets succ
ess, but the ability to fold facts using good memory into fantastic ideas.
My definition of a good memory is the ability to remember enough relevant facts
(Who is Darwin? What is espresso?), episodes (When and where did you vacation?),
and procedures (How do I walk? Drive?) so that I appropriately adapt to experie
nces, advancing my individual and communal goals.
A good memory is not the extraordinary memory of Solomon and Jill, the holy grai
l that we often aspire to and fail to achieve. To remember everything is a Sisyp
hean task, physiologically impossible and misery-inducing. To remember everythin
g is abnormal.
If you cannot forget an old love, how do you fall in love again? Forgetting allo
ws us to mold old memories, to learn, to forgive, to get on with life. Forgettin
g prunes our neural networks, allowing some to flourish and others to wither, im
proving efficiency. Rapid, automatic forgetting of all but a minute amount of th
e terabytes of data we are inundated with every day is a good thing. If your for
getfulness interferes with your function, seek medical help. If not, stop fretti
ng. Relax and enjoy your memory. For everything else, there's always Google!
_
According to the polls, two-thirds of American seniors about 37 million people are p
lagued by sleep problems. The consequences pose significant risks:
Daytime sleepiness and fatigue, which leads to a lack of exercise that in turn m
ay worsen weight problems, diabetes, and difficulty moving around.
Depression, which can both lead to sleep problems and be a result of them.
A weakened immune system, with an increased likelihood of disease.
Heightened pain sensitivity, making sleep even more difficult.
Nighttime falls and accidents.
Woman in ideal slumber.
Sleep problems often lead to cognitive confusion and problems with memory and co
ncentration as well. This is particularly scary for older people. By comparison,
poor sleep seems less important. Lots of seniors complain about memory lapses,
though sometimes they take care to keep quiet about it. You start to tell a frie
nd about a film you enjoyed but you can t come up with the title. You walk into the
living room and suddenly stop, confused about what you were looking for. You get
a beeper gadget to help you find your car keys.

These glitches are disconcerting, but in most cases they re perfectly normal. Stil
l, it s hard not to wonder and worry that they might be early signs of Alzheimer s o
r dementia.
SOMETHING MUST BE HAPPENING IN THE BRAIN!
It is well established that a specific brain region shrinks in old age. Called t
he hippocampus, it is deeply involved in the formation and retrieval of new memo
ries. But not exclusively. The prefrontal cortex the prominent area so closely ass
ociated with our human identity also tends to lose volume as we age. Significantly
, the prefrontal cortex is also vitally concerned with quality sleep.
Now a team of researchers led by Dr. Bryce Mander at Berkeley has provided evide
nce to directly link sleep problems, memory decline, and the prefrontal cortex.
Their study, published in the January 27 online edition of Nature Neuroscience (
link is external), compared a group of seniors to a group of young adults of col
lege age. The medial prefrontal cortex was about one-third smaller and the amoun
t of high-quality deep ( slow-wave ) sleep up to three-quarters less. The scores on
a memory test were also lower, both in the evening and much more so the followin
g morning.
How should we interpret these new findings? The researchers propose that atrophy
in the prefrontal cortex interferes with deep sleep. The lack of deep sleep, in
turn, is responsible for the deficits in memory storage and retrieval. Sounds r
easonable, but it is only one of several possibilities.
The study did not address the issue of why the medial prefrontal cortex, in part
icular, shrinks with age. Consider that this crucial brain area might itself be
affected by the loss of quality sleep. That would create a feedback loop:
Age-associated sleep disturbance impacts the cortex.
The resulting cortical shrinkage intensifies the sleep disturbance.
The intensified sleep disturbance adversely affects memory.
If such a feedback loop exists, with an ultimate effect on memory, we would need
new studies to confirm that sleep problems directly affect the cortex. Then we
would need to show that improving sleep slows the neural deterioration. Those wo
uld of course be breakthrough studies if they had positive results.
CHRONOTHERAPY FOR SLEEP AND MEMORY?
Speculation aside, there is plenty of evidence that several sleep difficulties a
ssociated with aging can be dramatically improved by steps that adjust the inner
clock (link is external). Methods with promise include bright light therapy, da
wn and dusk simulation, and low-dose melatonin.
Improving sleep without sleeping pills is a big enough benefit to merit using th
ese tools of chronotherapy. But there is more. When patients with dementia were
treated with enhanced light during the day and melatonin in the evening, nightti
me sleep interruptions decreased, daytime mood improved, and cognitive decline s
lowed. This landmark study (link is external) from The Netherlands certainly sug
gests positive feedback from quality sleep on brain function possibly even brain s
tructure.
We are not claiming that you can improve your memory by treating your sleep prob
lems, even though that makes sense. We know that deep sleep is important to memo
ry formation and retention. Chronotherapy research has produced evidence-based,

drug-free ways to enhance quality sleep. Someday soon we will know more about ho
w the brain benefits. Whatever the mechanisms prove to be, we are confident that
improving sleep will enhance the process.
We talk about types of elderly sleep disturbance and how to deal with them in Ch
apter 14, In Later Years, of Reset Your Inner Clock (link is external). Topics in
clude Age and Poor Sleep; Drugs, Light, and the Eye; Fixing Light Loss; Outdoors
and In; Early to Bed ; Alzheimer s and the Inner Clock; Shedding Light on Parkinson s;
Melatonin and Aging; What About Naps?; and Steps to Take.
+
The following are some simple strategies that anyone can use to improve the amou
nt of information that they take in and remember:
1. Pay attention. You cannot take in information unless you are paying attention
, and you cannot memorize information unless you are taking it in. Get enough fo
od and sleep, and avoid distractions such as a background radio or television.
2. Involve as many senses as possible. For example, if you are sitting in a lect
ure, you will remember more of what is being said if you listen and scribble dow
n a few notes. Or if you are reading a letter or an article, you will remember m
ore of what is written if you read it aloud to yourself.
3. Relate new information to what you already know. New information is much easi
er to remember if it can be contextualised. For example, if you are prescribed a
new antidepressant drug, you can relate its side-effects to the side-effects of
your old antidepressant drug. Or you might notice that both antidepressant drug
s are from the same class of drugs, and thus that they have similar side-effects
.
4. Structure information. For example, if you need to remember what ingredients
you need to cook a meal, think of them under the subheadings of starter, main co
urse, and desert, and visualize how many ingredients there are under each sub-he
ading. Or if you need to remember a telephone number, think of it in terms of th
e five first digits, the middle three digits, and the last three digits.
5. Use mnemonics. That is, tie information to visual images, sentences, acronyms
, or rhymes. For example, you might remember that your hairdresser is called Sha
ron by picturing a Rose of Sharon or a sharon fruit. You might remember the orde
r of the colours of the rainbow with the sentence, Richard of York got beaten in
Versailles . Or you might remember, as medical students do, the symptoms of varico
se veins with the acronym AEIOU : aching, eczema, itching, oedema, and ulceration.
6. Understand information. Try to understand more complex material before you tr
y to remember it. If possible, summarize the material in your own words and writ
e or type out your summary. Reorganize the material or your summary of the mater
ial so that it is easier to remember. By manipulating the information in this wa
y, you are forcing yourself to think about it actively.
7. Rehearse information. Review the information later on the same day or sleep o
ver it and review it the following day. Thereafter, review it at regular, spaced
intervals until you feel comfortable that you know it well enough.
8. Exercise your mind. Mental challenge can help to create new wire connections
in the brain, which makes it more effective and more resistant to memory disorde
rs such as Alzheimer s disease. So develop a new hobby, read a novel, learn a fore
ign language, or practice yourself at crosswords or sudoku.
9. Develop a healthy lifestyle. Eat a healthy, balanced diet, take regular exerc
ise, and avoid smoking. A healthy lifestyle increases the amount of blood and ox
ygen that is delivered to the brain, and reduces the risk of medical conditions

that can lead to memory loss such as Alzheimer s disease, stroke, and diabetes. Ex
ercise also increases your feel-good endorphins, which improves your mood and prev
ents depression. Depression results in impaired attention and concentration, and
is also a risk factor for Alzheimer s disease.
10. Get sufficient sleep. Sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, and feeli
ng alert and refreshed improves your attention and concentration.
11. See a doctor. Certain prescribed and over-the-counter drugs can impair your
attention and concentration, and hence your memory. If you suspect that this is
the case for you, see your family doctor. You should also see your family doctor
if you begin having memory problems that affect your ability to get by on a day
-to-day basis.
_
n October I attended a memory schema symposium at the annual meeting of the Societ
y of Neuroscience. This schema idea is that memory of prior learning provides an o
rganized framework for new learning. That is, new information is evaluated acco
rding to pre-existing mnemonic schema, which may influence how readily new infor
mation transfers into memory.
The notion of this kind of schema stems originally from Harry Harlow s ideas back
in the 1940s. Harlow showed that when a monkey learns a new kind of problem, he
solves it by slow plodding trial and error. However, if he has experience with a
large number of problems of a similar type or class, the trial and error is rep
laced by a process in which the individual problems are eventually solved insigh
tfully. For example, if you learn how to do task A, B, and C, when presented wit
h a new task D, you might say to yourself, I don t know how to do this task D, but
it is like task B, and I do know how to do that! Thus, you have a leg up on learn
ing how to do task D. The idea underlies how people become experts in a given fi
eld: their accumulated learning of various tasks provides them with a repertoire
of what Harlow called learning sets that makes it easier to learn new things.
Few of the speakers or audience discussants seemed to be aware of this literatur
e, and their ideas weren t really all that new, except that the focus is now shift
ing to memory instead of schemas for learning and insight. The basic idea of mem
ory schemas is that associations among learning objects profoundly affect how ea
sily and well a person can remember. Certainly, memory is promoted when learning
objects have meaningful relationships. Sometimes, however, you can easily remem
ber incongruent items because they are so different. These ideas are important t
o education, and in the panel discussion at the end of the symposium, speakers w
ere asked to address this matter. But nobody did. And in school systems, few edu
cators do either.
Master teachers have always known intuitively to structure meaningful relations
hips among learning objects. In principle, this is done by creating associations
of word pairs, concepts, spatial locations, and assorted memorization rules and
principles. All these things make it easier for students to remember. The probl
em is that we educators don t devote enough thought to practical ways to create st
ructured relationships that will promote memory formation and recall. I don t foll
ow much of the educational literature, but I suspect that very little of it focu
ses on the best way to organize the presentation of learning materials. For inst
ance, has anybody conducted an experiment that tests how well students remember
the central concepts in the U.S. constitution and its amendments, depending on h
ow the concepts are presented? Or what s the best way to structure learning object
s in the teaching of cell organelles and their functions? Typically, in the latt
er case for example, a biology teacher considers each organelle in turn and spew
s out information on what it does. That may not be the most memorizable way to p
resent the information. Maybe it would be better to begin with the biological ne
eds of the cell, how those needs relate to each other, and then how various orga
nelles fulfill those needs. In fact, I took that kind of approach in the on-line

biology curriculum I wrote (link is external), but no experiment has compared t

he ease of learning this way versus the traditional approach. I do know from my
own experience with trying to learn a little Spanish that the ease of memorizing
verb conjugations was greatly affected by how I laid out the words in a table.
Another example is the development of a PowerPoint method I developed to create
a one-flash card of animated learning objects that consists of mnemonic icons sy
stematically placed in specified spatial locations. The images represent concept
s to memorize, and the spatial locations create spatial relationships that promo
te memory of the learning objects. For details, see my e-book for students (link
is external).
In more general terms, the primary task of teachers and students is to develop s
trategies to enrich the formation of memory schemas. This means finding ways to
increase the number and congruence of associations among facts and concepts bein
g taught. The research shows that major benefits can be expected.
_
If you think you don t have a good memory, you probably don t. It is not just a matt
er of self-awareness. Beliefs about poor memory ability can cause poor memory. P
eople often think they are stuck with whatever memory capability they have, for
better a worse. Not true! The lesson is that anybody can improve memory ability,
if they learn how (I have two books that explain how). On the other hand, if yo
u believe you have a poor memory, you may not do what is necessary to improve yo
ur memory capability.
Evidence
1. Memory athletes who participate in memory tournaments train to improve their me
mory. Joshua Foer, author of the memory book, Moonwalking with Einstein, was a j
ournalist with an ordinary memory. In his reporting on memory athletes, he becam
e enamored with how they achieved amazing feats of memory. So he learned how the
y did it, trained, and in 2006 won the U. S. Memory Championship. When he later
quit training, his memory ability returned to normal.
2. Another line of evidence comes from the elderly in China. There, old age is v
enerated and researchers have noticed that older Chinese do NOT have poor memori
es. Picking up on this theme,HarvardUniversityresearchers studied 90 people, age
60 or older, and found he could change their memory task performance by manipul
ating their beliefs about their memory skills.
The manipulation involved creating a bias about memory ability. Subjects viewed
a list of about 50 words that either represented senile behaviors ( absent-minded,
enile, etc.) or represented wise behaviors ( sees all sides of issues,
smart,
lists were presented on a computer screen, and the subjects were asked to notic
e whether a flash occurred above or below a bulls eye that they were to focus on
. Subjects were to signal the location of the flash as soon as they could with a
computer key press. The rate of stimulus presentation was slow enough to allow
the subliminal messages to be encoded but fast enough to keep them from being re
gistered consciously. This was a way for the experimenter to make the conditioni
ng subliminal and implicit. Messages were presented in five sets, each containin
g 20 words. Before and after the intervention, subjects were given three differe
nt kinds of memory tests that are known to assess the kinds of memory decline th
at occur in old age.
Test results revealed a correspondence between memory performance and the condit
ioned bias. Compared with their pre-test memory scores, post-test scores increas
ed in the group that was primed with words signifying wisdom and were lower in t
he group that was primed with words suggesting senility.
Explanation
Belief changes attitude, and attitude changes performance. Psychologist Martin S

s
etc.). Th

eligman wrote a magnificent book, Learned Optimism, which points out that both o
ptimism and pessimism are learned explanatory styles that people use to evaluate
the causes of their successes and failures.
Seligman even has a test that measures one s explanatory style, on a scale ranging
from an optimist style (with negative events being temporary, specific, and ex
ternal) to the pessimist style (where they are regarded as permanent, pervasive
, and personalized). Optimists learn from their weaknesses and failures because
they believe they can be overcome, not pervasive but limited in scope. Optimists
know they can fix what is wrong. Pessimists quit trying, because they have conc
luded that their shortcomings are permanent, pervasive, and characteristic of th
emselves. The effects of these contrasting styles clearly affect one s view of the
ir ability to improve thinking and remembering. The good news is one can learn a
more beneficial explanatory style, in effect changing one s attitude.
It doesn t take long to learn a limiting explanatory style that says you are as go
od as you can get. I see this all the time in students, many of whom don t really
believe they can improve their memory capability, even when I show them how. Ins
tead of using the new approaches I teach, they fall back on their old ways of le
arning, which usually involves no particular strategy and the use of rote memory
.
Cure
The point is this: if you are motivated to develop a better memory and believe y
ou can, you are much more likely to do what it takes to have a better memory. Th
e implications for real-world memory performance seem clear. Believing can chang
e our attitude and motivate us to do the things that will make it so.
Dr. Bill Klemm. a.k.a. Memory Medic, is a Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M U
niversity. He has spent a career in brain research. His 50 years of experience w
ith students and his own aging have given him additional insights into how memor
y can be improved.
If your memory is ill,
Dr. Bill is your pill
_
Usually, when I forget a password, I try to figure out what I would likely have
come up with for the password, given my knowledge of myself. But it is amazing h
ow often I fail to discover what I initially came up with. Based on some relativ
ely recent work on implicit memory training, perhaps what I should be doing inst
ead is training myself on an implicit memory procedure so that if I forget my pa
ssword, I will at least be highly likely to guess it later on in response to the
right cue.
Researchers have known about implicit memory for nearly half a century. In their
seminal work, Warrington and Weiskrantz (1968 (link is external); 1970 (link is
external)) demonstrated that amnesic patients could use previously-presented in
formation to identify a whole from partial information, such as a picture from a
picture fragment or a word from a word fragment, despite being unable to consci
ously recollect the prior experience in which that primed information was presente
d. This is implicit memory.
Rehabilitation efforts can actually capitalize on the ability of amnesic patient
s to show implicit memory. In his book, Searching for Memory (link is external) , S
chacter describes an amnesic patient, Barbara, who through an implicit memory tr
aining procedure learned job skills (despite that she was incapable of conscious
ly recollecting any of the job training episodes themselves). Schacter and his c
olleagues used a vanishing cue procedure, whereby the amnesic patient required les
s and less cue information on each repeated trial to come up with the answer to

the question. With an amnesic patient, it isn t that the person is consciously rec
alling a past experience in which the answer was provided. Instead, the person s
imply has a high probability of correctly guessing the target answer in response
to the question, thanks to the training in which that answer was primed so to spe
ak. Later, the correct answer just pops into mind when presented with the right
cue.
So, can an implicit memory training procedure like that be used to circumvent ev
eryday memory retrieval failures like failing to consciously retrieve a password
?
In their article, Exploring Implicit Memory for Painless Password Recovery (link
is external), Denning, Bowers, van Dijk, and Juels (2011) examined the feasibilit
y of an implicit-memory-based authentication system. In it, a person would first
be familiarized with a set of images during training. Later, the person would h
ave to identify degraded images. Authentication in this system is based on wheth
er priming is shown, as a person who has been trained on the pre-specified set o
f images should show evidence of this training by identifying more degraded imag
es that had been previously familiarized than images that had not. A person who
had not been trained would not show this priming effect, instead identifying a c
omparable number of images in both categories. So, this differs from the common
method of trying to consciously retrieve a known secret password. Here, the secr
et itself lies in the set of trained images.
More recently, Bojinov, Sanchez, Reber, Boneh & Lincoln took the implicit-memory
-based authentication system idea a step further (link is external). They used a
computer game to train people on an implicit learning task. As the person playe
d the game, his or her brain would extract a pattern. The player would not be co
nsciously aware of this pattern, but could unknowingly or automatically re-creat
e that pattern in response to the right cues later on. The training game can be
found here: http://brainauth.com/testdrive/ (link is external), and more on this
research can be found in these outlets: Scientific American (link is external),
NBC (link is external), Popular Science (link is external), Phys.org (link is e
xternal), Businessweek (link is external).
The researchers argue that this method can be used to authenticate in high secur
ity situations, and to prevent rubber hose attacks (attempts at using coercion or
force to gain access to information).
Memory box
A memory box of the type used to help memory-impaired people find their rooms
Source: http://alzstore.com/Alzheimers/memory-box.htm
Years ago, as I toured the Alzheimer s unit at Baycrest (link is external) in Toro
nto, I noticed that there were memory boxes (link is external)outside of each pa
tient s room. Their purpose was to use personally-relevant cues to help memory-imp
aired patients find their rooms, or to assist in wayfinding (link is external).
Maybe accessing a password from memory should be viewed as similar to wayfinding
. Through a combination of priming from prior training and having the right set
of cues available, perhaps we can illuminate a path to our password (or other bu
ried information) without relying on conscious memory for having created it.
_
Learning is not only empowering but fulfilling. It gives our lives meaning and c
an benefit us professionally. Learning is also perhaps the best antidote to bore
dom and depression. And the really good news is that we can improve our ability
to learn.
As the brain re-wires itself from experience, it can change the capacity for lea

rning. That is, it can learn how to learn. This is especially true for certain k
inds of learning skills. Learning occurs at several hierarchical levels, ranging
from simple knowledge to higher levels of comprehension and incorporation, wher
e knowledge is applied to solving problems and creatively applied to new situati
ons. The formal way of categorizing different kinds of learning is based on the T
axonomy of Learning theory as developed by Benjamin Bloom. This scheme designated
three domains of learning: thinking, feeling, and doing. All three, of course,
involve memory. Using memorized information at one level influences how well th
e memory develops on a lasting basis. What I wish to stress here is that each of
the higher domains of learning contribute greatly toward mastering the long-ter
m memorization required in the lowest level of Knowledge learning. In short, I c
ontend that knowledge memory and the higher levels of learning are mutually supp
ortive.
The brain also learns a hierarchy of emotional responses to enrich the awareness
and growth of our attitudes and feelings. This hierarchy of levels begins with
Receiving and Responding, which refers to paying attention and reacting to emoti
onal stimuli. Next there is Valuing, in which the learner attaches salience and
emotional significance to an object or idea. Finally, there is Organizing and Ch
aracterizing, which Bloom considered separate but which I would combine. This h
ighest level of emotional memory occurs as learners accommodate various emotiona
l responses into their own emotional schema to such an extent that the learning
now becomes a personality characteristic. A common example is attitude adjustmen
t, wherein a person changes biases to create a new way of responding emotionally
to a given set of stimuli.
What was incompletely considered in the original formulation of emotional learni
ng is the influence of emotions on the memorization process.
When a person knows a body of knowledge across all levels of the learning hierar
chy, we can call them an expert. What makes an expert? In most any field, the expe
rts have a hard time telling you what it is that has made them an expert. Often
they are unable to tell you how they solve problems or generate new insights. Th
e reason is that expertise develops over time, and much of that learning has bec
ome so well learned that it is automatic. Moreover, experts have developed what
some call an implicit capacity in the form of what others have called a learning
style, or template, or schema.
Mental templates or schema put the brain on autopilot, enabling it to accomplish
tasks without much effort. This feature of learning is especially prominent in
the elderly most of whom have significant degeneration of the brain but are still
able to perform at seemingly normal mental levels. I remember being stunned at
seeing the shrunken brain in the brain scan of my dying elderly father. His ment
al functions were not nearly as diminished as the scan would suggest.
Schema manifests in other ways too. You may wonder
e more competent as they get older, at least up to
at 78, I am at the top of my game. Even though my
ed, I compensate with the lifetime schema acquired

why some people seem to becom

a point. I like to think that
brain has probably deteriorat
over the years.

Learning experiences help develop the capacity to learn. Part of that capacity l
ikely results from a better ability to absorb contextual cues and to make associ
ations among various cues. Rich experiences during childhood development also in
crease the likelihood of developing a more extensive repertoire of learning skil
ls.
It is possible to teach people how to learn to learn. One of the first experimen
tal demonstrations of the learning-to-learn phenomenon was by H. C. Blodgett in
1929. He studied maze behavior in rats, tracking how many errors they navigating
a maze for a food reward. The control group ran the maze and found the food, wi

th the number of errors decreasing slowly over successive days as they learned w
here the food was. Experimental groups ran the maze daily for three or seven day
s without any food reward. Naturally, they made many errors each time, because t
here was nothing to learn. However, when they were subsequently allowed access t
o a food reward, the number of errors dropped precipitously on the very next day s
trial. In other words, the rats had been learning about the maze its layout, numb
er of turns, etc during the initial explorations, even when no reward was availab
le. The learning just wasn t being put to use.
The idea was expanded and formalized some 20 years later by the famous physiolog
ical psychologist Harry Harlow. Harlow studied monkeys, testing their progress
on visual problems and other tests of discernment. Training on a series of diffe
rent but related problems accelerated their rate of improvement. Increasing the
number of problems on which monkeys were tested led to the observation that the
monkeys general learning competence improved over time.
Harlow developed the prominent learning set theory, which posits that learning any
task is associated with implicit learning capabilities that can generalize to o
ther related learning situations. These days, educators think of this as transfer
, where learning one task may make it easier to learn another related one. Typica
lly, this learning set is acquired subconsciously as a by-product of experience.
One practical illustration of learning-set theory is language learning. Many peo
ple who learn a foreign language find it easier to learn a second language even a
third language or more, if they are related, as in Romance languages. Learning h
ow to set up equations to solve a math problem can make it easier to set up equa
tions for other math problems. Learning how to play one song on a piano can make
it easier to learn other songs. Learning how to play one musical instrument mak
es it easier to learn another instrument.
Ever wonder why some people can learn like sponges, soaking up information in gr
eat gobs, while others struggle to learn? Learning sets provide an explanation.
It is akin to the rich getting richer, while the poor get poorer. The more you kn
ow axiom is especially heartening for learners who struggle early on mastering a
given learning task. They will get better if they stay with it and don t get too d
iscouraged.
But then there is the typical case that most people just rock along with whateve
r learning abilities they have, making no effort to change basic learning and me
mory skills. Improving your memory capability, for example, requires you to make
a conscious effort to use the ideas and techniques that are explained in my boo
k. Just knowing what to do accomplishes nothing if you don t act on that knowledge
.
Yet making any kind of change is often hard for many people to do. It has always
been hard for me to understand, for example, why students especially seem reluc
tant to use these memory principles and techniques. They have a compelling need
to improve their memory abilities. I wrote about my frustration in an earlier Ps
ychology Today blog post. Fellow college professors have told report similar obs
ervations. One professor posted this observation: I used to try and help college
students to improve their learning skills, but sadly very few truly were interes
ted. For the most part, just getting them to study at all was a big issue. I lea
rned to ask about their 'study' environment--which often included non-stop text
messaging interruptions, sometimes 'multi-tasking' with Facebook and listening t
o overly loud music.
Why the reluctance to improve learning and memory skills? One explanation might
be hubris. A teacher commented on my blog post as follows: Contrary to what you m
ight expect, the students who were by far the easiest to teach were the poorly e
ducated, sometimes not particularly literate ones. These students knew their own

limitations and were happy for all the help that they got in study, literacy an
d life skills. At the opposite end of the spectrum, all the really difficult stu
dents I ever had in my classroom were university students, particularly those do
ing higher degrees. In my own classrooms, students seem to think they know best h
ow to learn. After all, they perfected their learning style enough to get admitt
ed into a competitive university.
Self-doubt may be another possible explanation to resist improving learning and
memory skills. Many students lack confidence in their learning ability, which th
ey may think is fixed and unchangeable. Adults sometimes think (and even pervers
ely revel in) the affirmation that they are who they are, and they can t or don t ne
ed to change.
Another reason might be that people are just too busy. A posted response from a
college student explained it: As a college student myself I can say that training
our memory is just not my top priority. We feel so stressed and busy with tryin
g to keep up on school, studying, work, and relationships that any time we would
get to train our memory we just want to catch up on sleep. Here was my response:
Hey, don't give me that. I was a harried, overwhelmed college student too until I
used good memory principles and techniques. Think of it this way: college is li
ke a very steep mountain that takes four years to walk up the road to the top. C
onsider how much easier the trip would be if you took two weeks to learn how to
ride a bike. That's about 1% of the total time. And, when you get to the top, yo
u have a huge set of learning and memory skills you can use to make your work li
fe easier more productive.
Bottom line: people use all sorts of excuses to resist improving learning-to-lea
rn skills. They should read my book, Blame Game, How To Win It.
_
Next time you get a moment to yourself, have a rest. And then notice what your b
rain is up to while you are resting . You might realize that your mind is not at re
st at all! For example, I just got in from work and had a few minutes to myself,
and I noticed that I was thinking about a whole lot of things what I have to do
tomorrow, what happened in that experiment I was running and what I might have
for dinner were just a few of them.
The myth that we only use 10% of our brains is just that a myth. In fact, the br
ain is so busy that most of it is active all of the time. That s why experiments u
sing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) include a control condition th
at takes into account all the activity that is going on in the brain that is not
related to the function we re interested in. For example, to find out the brain r
egions involved in remembering a list of words the control condition would be si
mply viewing the words the difference between them is what is usually reported.
Otherwise, brain activity in the two conditions would look remarkably alike.
Not only is the brain always active, but it turns out that the brain s activity at
rest has a very unusual pattern. fMRI studies have revealed constantly-active n
etworks of brain regions that show correlated activity. These networks turn up t
ime and time again - in the same people, different people, awake, asleep, even u
nder anesthesia. These networks are intriguing for a two reasons:
1) They are functionally relevant. In other words, the same networks are active
in conditions where people are not resting but doing things like looking at pict
ures (visual network), making movements (somatomotor network), paying attention
to hard-to-spot stimuli (attention network) and so on.
2) Except one. One network is actually less active when people were actively eng
aged in a mental task, but very strongly active at rest. Because of this it was

named the default mode (link is external)

ht: on when the brain is off .

network. Almost like the brain s pilot lig

The default mode network

The default mode network
Source: http://www.hindawi.com/journals/ert/2012/385626/fig3/
Of course we know that the brain is not really off at rest, just doing something d
ifferent. Suggestions for what the default mode network might be doing include s
elf-analysis, thinking back to the past or planning the future. We don t know yet.
Even though we don t know exactly what it is doing, some studies have suggested th
at the default mode network can tell us a lot about what happens to the brain in
Alzheimer s disease. The amount of correlation, sometimes called functional connec
tivity , between areas in the default mode network, is reduced in patients with Al
zheimer s disease (link is external) and altered in patients with mild cognitive i
mpairment (link is external), who are at risk of developing Alzheimer s disease.
More recently, a study (link is external) by Joseph Goveas and colleagues at the
Medical College of Wisconsin suggests that measuring the default mode network m
ay also tell us about the brain s response to Alzheimer s disease treatments like th
e group of drugs known as acetylcholinesterase inhibitors (link is external). Th
ese drugs are still the main treatment available for Alzheimer s disease, even tho
ugh they rarely produce long-term improvements in memory and other types of cogn
ition. If we had a greater understanding of how they work we may be able to use
them to better effect.
Goveas et al. showed changes in the default mode network in patients with mild A
lzheimer s disease who were treated with the acetylcholinesterase inhibitor donepe
zil. These patients showed cognitive improvement measured by two tests: the mini
-mental state exam (link is external) and the Alzheimer s disease assessment scale
. In addition, their level of improvement correlated with increases in functiona
l connectivity between brain regions in the default-mode network.
The findings suggest it may be possible to predict or assess the efficacy of Alz
heimer s drugs using resting-state fMRI scans. It is possible we may even be able
to predict which patients are most likely to respond to treatment.
In this study Goveas and colleagues focused on using a cognitive test, like the
mini-mental state exam, to validate the fMRI technique and show that the default
mode network changes were meaningful. But studies like this one that follow pat
ients over time open up the possibility that fMRI scans can provide information
about how a patient will respond to treatment even before we can see any effects
on cognitive tests.
_
When television first became popular around 1950, it was dominated by such shows
as the Milton Berle comedy hour, I Love Lucy, and professional wrestling. Those w
ho missed out on the halcyon days of early television might enjoy reading about
its history (link is external).
The potential for a damaging impact on education was recognized at the outset. I
n 1950 Boston University's President Dr. Daniel L. Marsh warned that if the [tele
vision] craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to h
ave a nation of morons. Well here we are. Just look at how voters re-elect incomp
etents, panderers, and demagogues.
Quick to jump into the breach anticipated by the brain-eating monster of TV, a n
ew movement of educational TV sprang up (link is external). National Educational T
elevision was born on May 16, 1954 and was a non-profit effort to bring educatio

nal programs to the masses. The network was not sustainable as such and was tran
sformed into the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in October, 1970, which conti
nues to the present. Many of the stations are university affiliates that have in
modern times made some attempts at education, but the programming now is devote
d largely to music and news. In the early days, if you got up at five AM you mig
ht learn a foreign language or something else educationally useful. I remember a
round 1965 seeing my 5-year-old son looking at test patterns and then a college
physics course, while waiting for the cartoons to come on. I m sure he didn t learn
much physics. Today, educational efforts can still be found on television, but m
ost such programming is distributed over the Internet.
I, among numerous others, am most concerned about how television affects childho
od brain development and capability for learning. It steals time away from doing
things, such as interacting with others and playing with objects. Language and
communication abilities are stunted because TV communication is unidirectional.
Kids don t generate communication, they just receive it. The Raise Smart Kid websi
te (link is external) cites scholarly reports showing that TV viewing takes away
time from reading and improving reading skills through practice. Kids watching
cartoons and entertainment television during pre-school years have poorer pre-re
ading skills at age 5.
The corrosive nature of television s effect on childhood intellect has only grown
in recent years. The Online College Course s website has a telling info-graphic ti
tled This is your child s brain on television (link is external). Can you believe it
?by the age of three, 1/3 of children have a TV in their room. The average child
watches 1500 hours of TV a year, but only goes to school 900 hours a year. Only
a few of the shows that young children watch have much educational value. There
are a few exceptions: Sesame Street and Mr. Robert s Neighborhood got 5-apple rat
ings for educational usefulness. But a lot of the other stuff is just plain junk
. Moreover, a lot of what kids see is not age appropriate, commonly with sex and
violence.
The website points out some of the deleterious effects on attitudes and behavior
when young children spend too much time watching television. I want to focus on
two issues related to learning to learn. One area of concern is learning to rea
d. Reading, for those who do it well, is the most efficient way to learn. But ki
ds these days tend not to read well. Many don t want to read, and they were probab
ly conditioned that way by watching too much television. TV is the easy way to g
et information: you don t have to do anything?just sit there like a lump and watch
.
A study reviewed in the Huffington Post (link is external) revealed that America
n high-school students, when they do read, read books that are at the fifth grad
e level. Of the top 40 books teens in grades 9-12 are reading in school, the ave
rage reading level of that list is grade 5.3. Another study (link is external) e
stablished that 67% of U.S. students are reading below grade level. I know these
are real problems. I interact with dozens of teachers at professional developme
nt workshops (link is external), and every teacher I have asked say their studen
ts are two or more years behind grade level.
The other problem that nobody seems to talk much about is the learning passivity
imposed by television. Young people are being conditioned, much like Pavlov s dog
s, to be passive learners. Learning how to learn well requires active engagement
. Good learners must train themselves to generate and sustain interest, to pay a
ttention, to grapple with ideas, and integrate knowledge into ever-evolving lear
ning styles and thinking schema. Reading does that. Good learners do things with
their learning: they grow the depth of understanding, they hone creativity skil
ls. Hands-on learning activities can help young people develop such skills, althou
gh minds-on activities are much better. In any case, promoting such skills is some
thing that TV, even educational TV, does rather poorly.

So the next time you get up in arms about our failing schools, remember that a c
hildhood filled with TV is probably a big part of the problem.
_
urning a medical student into a doctor takes a whole lot of knowledge. B. Price
Kerfoot, an associate professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, was frustr
ated at how much knowledge his students seemed to forget over the course of thei
r education. He suspected this was because they engaged in what he calls binge an
d purge learning: They stuffed themselves full of facts and then spewed them out
at test time. Research in cognitive science shows that this is a very poor way t
o retain information, as Kerfoot discovered when he went looking in the academic
literature for answers. But he also stumbled upon a method that really is effec
tive, called spaced repetition. Kerfoot devised a simple digital tool to make en
gaging in spaced repetition almost effortless. In more than two dozen studies pu
blished over the past five years, he has demonstrated that spaced repetition wor
ks, increasing knowledge retention by up to 50 percent. And Kerfoot s method is ea
sily adapted by anyone who needs to learn and remember, not just those pursuing
MDs.
The theory behind spaced repetition is simple: when we first learn a fact, our m
emory of it is volatile, subject to change or disappear. Each time we encounter
that fact again, however, the memory becomes stronger and more stable especially i
f the encounters are spread out over time. Cramming the night before an exam (or
a speech or a presentation) is a sure way to make the information vanish from y
our head a short while later. But exposing yourself to that same information mul
tiple times over weeks or months fixes it firmly in your brain. Kerfoot s innovati
on was to make these spaced-out learning sessions easy and convenient. Starting
with the knowledge medical students had to master in his own specialty of urolog
y, Kerfoot devised questions about the curriculum, with multiple-choice answers,
that he sent in weekly emails to the students participating in the study. The s
tudents took a few minutes to answer the questions on their laptops or smartphon
es; each week brought a new round of queries, mixing new material with material
already covered. At the end of the year, the students who received the spaced em
ails scored significantly higher on a test of their urology knowledge.
Since that first study, published in the journal Medical Education in 2007, Kerf
oot has evaluated the effectiveness of spacing out exposure to a variety of othe
r topics that doctors in training need to learn, such as performing a physical e
xam, diagnosing medical ailments, and administering a cancer screening test. In
each case, the spaced-out information delivered to students on their devices hel
ped them to recall the information better.
How can you learn like one of Kerfoot s Harvard Medical School residents? Most ema
il programs allow you to schedule the sending of messages, making it easy to cre
ate a spaced-repetition course for yourself. Divide up what you need to know the t
ext of a speech, the material on an exam into smaller units, no more than a few se
ntences long. Then put the information into emails scheduled to be sent to yours
elf at weekly intervals. To achieve the greatest memory-strengthening effect, mi
x up old and new material, and put the information in the form of a question to
which you ll have to recall the answer. You ll find that your email is making you sm
arter no all-nighters necessary.
+
Call it the learning paradox : the more you struggle and even fail while you re tryin
g to master new information, the better you re likely to recall and apply that inf
ormation later.
The learning paradox is at the heart of productive failure, a phenomenon identifie
d by Manu Kapur, a researcher at the Learning Sciences Lab at the National Insti
tute of Education of Singapore. Kapur points out that while the model adopted by
many teachers and employers when introducing others to new knowledge
providing

lots of structure and guidance early on, until the students or workers show that
they can do it on their own
makes intuitive sense, it may not be the best way t
o promote learning. Rather, it s better to let the neophytes wrestle with the mate
rial on their own for a while, refraining from giving them any assistance at the
start. In a paper published earlier this year in the Journal of the Learning Sc
iences, Kapur and a co-author, Katerine Bielaczyc, applied the principle of prod
uctive failure to mathematical problem solving in three schools in Singapore.
With one group of students, the teacher provided strong scaffolding
instructional
support and feedback. With the teacher s help, these pupils were able to find the
answers to their set of problems. Meanwhile, a second group was directed to solv
e the same problems by collaborating with one another, absent any prompts from t
heir instructor. These students weren t able to complete the problems correctly. B
ut in the course of trying to do so, they generated a lot of ideas about the nat
ure of the problems and about what potential solutions would look like. And when
the two groups were tested on what they d learned, the second group significantly
outperformed the first.
The apparent struggles of the floundering group have what Kapur calls a hidden ef
ficacy : they lead people to understand the deep structure of problems, not simply
their correct solutions. When these students encounter a new problem of the sam
e type on a test, they re able to transfer the knowledge they ve gathered more effec
tively than those who were the passive recipients of someone else s expertise.
In the real world, problems rarely come neatly packaged, so being able to discer
n their deep structure is key. But, Kapur notes, none of us like to fail, no mat
ter how often Silicon Valley entrepreneurs praise the salutary effects of an ide
a that flops or a start-up that crashes and burns. So, he says, we need to design
for productive failure by building it into the learning process. Kapur has ident
ified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle. First, cho
ose problems to work on that challenge but do not frustrate. Second, provide learn
ers with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they re doing. Third, give
learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the probl
ems. And to those students and workers who protest this tough-love teaching styl
e: you ll thank me later.
_
As a psychologist, I have spent over a decade investigating how Working Memory i
s crucial to learning. Throughout this journey, I have the privilege of working
closely with educators and parents and I am grateful to those who have contacted
me and taken me beyond the world of theory and data to see the classroom from t
heir perspective. Here are excerpts from some recent emails:
I have an 8-year-old son who has been struggling with school since he was 5.
I've taken him to several psychologists, psychiatrists, and even pediatric neur
ologists and I have not gotten a clear diagnosis other than ADHD. What I noticed
is that my son has an issue with his working memory. All of the research I did
points to this being his major problem.
Samantha is 12 and has been assessed as having difficulties with her working
memory. The school has identified this [and] I am keen to see if I can find way
s to help my daughter.
Now more than ever, it is crucial to accurately assess Working Memory. The incid
ence of learning disorders is increasing and there is growing awareness of how W
orking Memory deficits feature in a number of learning difficulties. Working mem
ory has also been described as a controller , a cognitive resource that can keep a
goal in mind, bring in cognitive resources from different parts of the brain, an
d also manage incoming information.
Each of the learning needs listed in the Figure have very different areas of dif

ficulty. For example, students with dyslexia are characterized by their trouble
reading, those with dyscalculia find an assortment of math problems tricky, stud
ents with dyspraxia have motor impairments, those with ADHD display troublesome
behavior, and students with Autistic Spectrum Disorder have limited social skill
s. Given their distinctive profile, what do these groups have in common? All of
them have a weakness in working memory. That is not to say that poor working mem
ory causes the core deficit in their respective disorder. However, it coexists a
s a separate problem and ultimately leads to learning difficulties. For example,
a deficit in working memory does not cause motor problems, however in my own pu
blished research I found that working memory weaknesses in a student with dyspra
xia leads to learning difficulties, regardless of their IQ.
Research to date indicates that teachers awareness of working memory deficits in
the classroom can still be quite low. In a recent study, the majority of teacher
s interviewed only picked up early warning signs of working memory failure in th
eir students 25 percent of the time, often thinking that the students were unmot
ivated or daydreaming instead.
So how can an educator accurately diagnosis a potential Working Memory problem i
n a student? Stemming from my research findings, I have published the Automated
Working Memory Assessment, a computer-based assessment of working memory that ha
s automatised test administration and presents results in a form that is easy to
interpret by non-experts. The AWMA provides measures each of verbal and visuo-s
patial short-term memory and working memory and currently, it is the only standa
rdised assessment of working memory available for teachers to use. Not only does
the AWMA eliminate the need for prior training in test administration, it also
provides a practical and convenient way for educators to screen students for sig
nificant working memory problems. It is standardised for use from childhood (fiv
e years) to adulthood (80 years) in a revised version (due end-2012).
Once the specific strengths and weaknesses of a student s working memory profile a
re known, specific and targeted accommodations can be made to support learning.
The aim in supporting students with learning difficulties is not just to help th
em survive in the classroom, but to thrive as well. Strategies can provide scaff
olding and support that will unlock their working memory potential to boost lear
ning.
Recently, there has been an explosion of research investigating the potential be
nefits of training Working Memory. In a recent study of students with learning d
ifficulties, a computerized working memory training programme (www.JungleMemory.
com (link is external)) was found to significantly improve verbal and visual-spa
tial working memory, IQ scores, as well as language scores as measured by standa
rdized assessments.
When working with schools, I have seen how supporting their Working Memory can m
ake a significant difference to their learning and ultimately their academic suc
cess. The interested reader is welcome to look at the resources listed below for
further information on Working Memory and learning.
_
I probably need to explain a couple of learning principles mentioned in the orig
inal post on jazz-band teaching and learning.
One principle is operant conditioning, which is inherent in band classes. It wil
l truly pay off to find creative ways to employ operant conditioning in academic
-course classes, because it is the most powerful teaching technique I know of. I
assume they teach this in colleges of education, because kindergarten teachers
do a version of it all the time with the gold-star reward paradigm. Fully implemen
ted, the idea is that little successes bring little rewards, and as the desired
behavior becomes established, the bar is raised for further reward, or positive
reinforcement as the psychologists call it. A repeated process of successive appr

oximation can lead to astonishing results in short order. I think that something
like this is operating in band class.
The reward in jazz-band, and that includes orchestra band class, is the immediat
e gratification a student gets when playing a few new notes or chords, for examp
le. In band, learning something new is usually done in small readily accomplishe
d steps, and there is immediate feedback from hearing what is played and/or comm
ents from classmates or the band director. Contributing successfully to the band
effort is also rewarding, because all students know they are on the team and maki
ng a needed contribution. For emphasis, I repeat the four key elements of operan
t conditioned learning:
learning occurs in small successive steps
with each step the student DOES something
feedback is immediate
positive reinforcement follows.
The second key principle is deliberate practice, which is also an inherent feature
of band class. The idea is not only to practice but to plan specific strategies
and tactics for the practice. Teachers, of course, have a plan for teaching eac
h given content item, but that is not the same as the student having a learning
plan. Teaching and learning are not the same, and the problem in schools is usua
lly traceable to inadequate learning.
The best learners bring conscious design, awareness, analysis, and correction of
error to their learning efforts. This is exactly what has to be done in band cl
ass. For example, the learner, guided by the band director, has to develop an ap
proach to move from each small step of mastery, such as playing a few new bars,
to learning the whole sheet-music score.
Memory athletes use this kind of memory practice to rise above their own innate m
emory capability, which is usually not much better than anyone else s capability.
This is the kind of practice performed by superstars in any field: music, art, b
usiness, sports, science (and straight-A students and stellar jazz-band players)
.
Superstars reach that level of achievement by:
Having the passion, resources, and time to learn their craft. This means mak
ing a commitment to becoming a better learner.
Working hard at their craft with smart, intentional planning to improve thei
r basic competencies in very specific ways. In the process of mastering a specif
ic learning task, they are also learning-to-learn.
Raising their goals to new and more challenging goals. This includes identif
ying people to compete against.
Structuring practice in ways that provide constant and detailed feedback.
Continually expanding their knowledge base. This includes learning the tacti
cs others use successfully in study.
Focusing on improving weaknesses.
Receiving encouragement and help from others. This means having access to a
circle of friends and mentors who value achievement.
In band class, the help referenced in the last bullet item often comes from fell
ow students, because they need each other to perform well and share in the appla
use when they perform in public. Peer support is central to success of athletic
teams. Academic classes would surely benefit from finding ways to develop team s
pirit.
All of these things require students to be motivated. I emphasized this in the o
riginal post, in the context of the passions generated by jazz. Passion is harde

r to generate in academic classes, but it is no less important.

Some readers of the original post probably are awaiting my reply to the many com
ments that have been made. I will do that in the next post, my last on this jazz
-band issue.
_
I just came back from a jazz festival at Katy High School in Texas that show-cas
ed student stage bands from ten schools mostly near Houston, but some as far awa
y as Beaumont and Brownsville (the latter band stole the show).
The festival was also a teaching event, with each band or ensemble performing fo
r 30 minutes, followed by 30 minutes of critique from six professional jazz musi
cians (two of whom were music professors at universities). The critiques were sh
ared with the small audience consisting almost exclusively of family and friends
, even though this festival was advertised for the general public. Performances
were staggered so that if you didn t want to hear a critique you could go hear a s
tudent combo and vice versa. The facilities were magnificent, highlighted by the
presence of a natatorium, impressive athletic fields and stadium, and a Perform
ing Arts Center where the festival took place. If Texas schools are hurting for
funds, it certainly wasn t evident at Katy High School.
I was astonished at how accomplished these students were. I asked myself: How di
d those kids learn such complex music? The music played was mostly the big-band
music of Goodman, Basie, Kenton, Ellington, and others from the eras of swing an
d progressive-modern jazz of the '50s and '60s.
Jazz is sophisticated stuff. Yet these bands, of 16 to 24 kids each, could do wh
at a lot of adult musicians cannot do. One band was a middle-school band, and th
e professional musicians who critiqued each band s performance were amazed that th
ese 7th and 8th graders played like adults!
Jazz fans everywhere lament that jazz seems like a dying art form overwhelmed by
the simpler music of country, rap, hip-hop, and whatever it is that most kids l
isten to these days. But the professional coaches at the festival reassured the au
dience that jazz is in good hands. Fortunately, many school and university music p
rograms teach jazz.
Learning to playing any musical instrument is hard, but playing jazz is the ulti
mate challenge. In jazz you not only have to know the tunes, you have to use the
chord structure and complex rhythms to compose on the fly. A jazz professor fro
m the University of North Texas counseled in one of his critiques, I know you hav
e sheet music you have to follow, but when you hear something in your head, play
it. That s what we (jazz musicians) do
improvise!
Another jazz professor, during a critique session had two bands re-play a number
from their performance. About one-third of the way through, he silently and cas
ually walked through the rhythm section (piano, guitar, bass, and drums) and pic
ked up the sheet music. The kids went right on playing without skipping a beat,
because they had already memorized the sheet music. His point was they were usin
g the sheet music as a crutch and not engaging with each other. Musicians talk t
o each other with their instruments, and listening is a big part of jazz improvi
sation. Students needed to be engaged with what each member of the rhythm sectio
n was doing, and, moreover, the rhythm section needed to interact with the saxes
, trombones, and trumpets.
Hearing such wonderful music from children raised a nagging question. Why can t ki
ds master complicated science, math, language arts, or social studies? Why does
everybody struggle so mightily to get kids to pass simple-minded government-mand

ated tests in academic subjects?

And then it hit me. Jazz-band teachers do the right things in teaching that othe
r teachers need to learn how to do.
Two things are essential in teaching, the professionalism of the teacher and the
motivation of the students. Most school jazz programs provide both. Sad to say,
this is not so true of traditional curriculum.
Consider professionalism. It was clear that these band directors really knew wha
t they were doing. Some had professional playing experience. Most, I am certain,
were music majors in college. Think about what they have to do: They take young
kids who know little about music beyond humming a tune and teach them music the
ory, teach them to read music, and teach them to play the different instruments
in a band. And then they have to teach students how to compose on the fly. You c
an t do that without being a real professional.
As for motivation, teaching and learning jazz involves clearly identifiable moti
vating features. Jazz-band teachers can t take credit for some of these features,
but creative teachers in other subject areas can think of similar motivating thi
ngs they could be doing, based on what is involved in jazz.
First, there is passion. Jazz stirs the emotions, from blues to ballads to hot s
wing. If Benny Goodman s music doesn t make you want to jump up and dance, you bette
r check your pulse to see if you are still alive. That brings up this point: Jaz
z is fun! Learning chemistry, for example, is almost never considered by student
s to be fun, but teachers should be thinking of ways to make it fun.
Some academic subjects do have intrinsic emotional impact. If, for example, the
emotions of history students are not stirred by the Federalist Papers, or the tu
rmoil of the Civil War and the country s other wars, then history is not being com
petently taught. If the beauty of the laws of physics and chemistry or the biolo
gy of life are not evident in the teaching of science, it is the teacher s fault.
Second is that jazz is personal. A jazz student intellectually owns his instrume
nt. He or she owns the assigned space on the bandstand. One critiquing musician
at the festival reminded students they own that space and if the sheet music sta
nd or the audio at their station was not left just right from the previous band,
they must fix it. It is now their space.
How well a student has learned jazz is public knowledge. They can t hide. What you
know and can do is on public display, all the time in practice sessions with fe
llow band members and, of course, in public performances. In marked contrast, it
is against the law for teachers in other subject areas to reveal grades on indi
vidual performance, even within the more private area of the classroom. The beli
ef system in education these days is that you should not allow an unprepared and
under-performing student to be embarrassed. What dingbat policy maker came up w
ith that? I know; it comes from the perverse politically correct movement that i
gnores the reality that self-esteem needs to be earned.
Third is that jazz is ultimate constructivism. All teachers know about construct
ivism, which is the idea that students have to do something to show they have ma
stered the learning task. Student jazz bands and combos demonstrate personal acc
omplishment all the time in rehearsals and stage performances. But in many tradi
tional courses, the main constructive thing students do is fill in circles on a
Scantron test answer sheet. "Science fairs encourage constructivism, but these ar
e usually one-time events. Students need to be doing something every day to demo
nstrate their learning. In English, how often to students write and re-write an
essay, poem, or short story? Does anybody write book reports anymore? Do student
s spend hours of writing and editing comparable to what a jazz student spends in

practice? In social studies, how many students are required to explain and deba
te capitalism, socialism, fascism, democracy, and republican government?
Fourth, jazz is social. Jazz students perform as a group, either in a big band o
r combo. Recall the earlier example from the festival where the professionals ha
d to emphasize this point by taking away the sheet music. Students had to learn
to talk and listen to each other through their instruments. In traditional educa
tion, there is a movement called collaborative learning, the idea of learning te
ams, but many teachers don t use this approach or do it without regard to the prov
en formalisms needed for success. Regardless of academic subject, students benef
it when they learn how to help each other learn.
Part of the social aspect of jazz is competition. In many schools, students don t
have to compete to get into a music class. But once in, they have to display lea
rning to advance into more prestigious classes (think the One O'Clock Lab Band ban
d at the University of North Texas). In whatever music lab they are in, they hav
e to compete for first chair in their instrument section. It is like competing to
make the varsity and then the first team in sports. Where is the equivalent in s
cience, social studies, or language arts?
Unlike traditional education, where the goal is to meet minimum standards on sta
te-mandated tests, jazz band directors make very clear their high expectations t
hat everybody in each band class should become as proficient as they can. The wh
ole point of their teaching is mastery and excellence. They expect excellence an
d they get it, as witnessed by festival performances such as I saw. Thanks to th
e unenlightened thinking of No Child Left Behind law, our public education has d
egenerated into No Child Pushed Forward.
And finally we consider the matter of reward. Somewhere in the college courses o
f teachers they learned about positive reinforcement, and most teachers try to use
these ideas to shape the learning achievements of their students. But jazz perf
ormance provides public reward, in the form of public applause. Is there anythin
g comparable in the teaching of science, social studies, or language arts? Is pu
blishing (inflated) Honor Roll lists in the newspaper the best we can do?
So in a nutshell, the reason jazz students do so well is because their learning
environment is built around:
Passion
Personal ownership and accountability
Constructivism
Social interaction
High Expectations
Reward
What I took home from this experience is a renewed feeling that outside of jazz
music programs our schools are letting our children down. These young musicians
prove that when motivated and challenged, they can do astonishing things. The pr
inted program for the festival concluded with the comment, The future belongs to
those who are able to capture their creative intelligence. Jazz music education
and performance develop the ability to create and produce the ideas that are ind
ividually unique.
Why doesn t the rest of education do that?
This festival experience leads me to suggest:
Ten Commandments for Better Teaching
1. Love your students as yourself.

2. Be professional. Know the stuff you teach.

3. Instill passion for the content - especially, make knowledge fun.
4. Make learning personal. Show students how to own their learning.
5. Take away the hiding places of unprepared and under-performing students. Let
them embarass themselves.
6. Show students they have to earn self-esteem. You can't give it to them. Prais
e success and do so publicly when it is earned.
7. Require students to do things that show they have mastered what you are tryin
g to teach them.
8. Give students opportunities to "strut their stuff" in public, in and out of t
he class.
9. Help students learn how to work with others as a team.
10. Expect excellence. Do not teach to the lowest common denominator.
_
Working memory refers to the memory you can consciously hold in your mind at any
one instant such as a phone number you just looked up. Most people can only hold
about four totally independent items in their working memory.
Working memory relates to intelligence. The reason is that thinking involves str
eaming into the brain's "thought engine" chunks of information held in working m
emory. The working memory streams in, much like a Web video streams into your co
mputer. The more you can hold in working memory, the more information the brain
has to think with that is, the smarter it can be.
IQ is not fixed. It improves dramatically in the early school years in all child
ren. Moreover, a recent study shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ can chang
e (for better or worse) in teenagers.
Educators have known for some time that it is possible to train ADHD children to
have better working memories, and in the process improve their school performan
ce. The idea that working memory capacity might be expanded by training normal c
hildren has not yet caught on. Test-driven teaching in U.S. schools teaches stud
ents what to learn, not how to learn.
Researchers in Japan recently tested whether a simple working memory training me
thod could increase the working memory capacity of children. While they were at
it, they tested for any effect on IQ. Children ages 6-8 were trained 10 minutes
a day each day for two months. The training task to expand working memory capaci
ty consisted of presenting a digit or a word item for a second, with one-second
intervals between items. For example, a sequence might be 5, 8, 4, 7, with one-s
econd intervals between each digit. Test for recall could take the form of "Wher
e in the sequence was the 4?" or "What was the 3rd item?" Thus students had to p
ractice holding the item sequence in working memory. With practice, the trainers
increased the number of items from 3 to 8.
After training, researchers tested the children on another working memory task.
Scores on this test indicated in all children that working memory correlated wit
h IQ test scores. When first graders were tested for intelligence, the data show
ed that intelligence scores increased during the year by 6% in controls, but inc
reased by 9% in the group that had been given the memory training. The memory tr
aining effect was even more evident in the second graders, with a 12% gain in in
telligence score in the memory trained group, compared with a 6% gain in control
s. As might be expected, the lower IQ children showed the greatest gain from mem
ory training.
I recently found a paper revealing lasting improvements in brain function were p
roduced in healthy adults by only five weeks of practice on three working-memory
tasks involving the location of objects in space, using a training program call
ed CogMed. Similar results have been reported by other investigators.

Another study provides strong evidence that increasing adult working memory capa
city will raise their IQ. Subjects, young adults were trained on a so-called dua
l N-back test in which subjects were asked to recall a visual stimulus that they
saw two, three or more stimulus presentations in the past. As performance impro
ved with each block of trials, the task demands were increased by shifting from
two-back to three, then three to four, etc. Daily training took about 25 minutes
.
The investigators found working memory training improved scores on the IQ test.
Moreover, the effect was dose-dependent, in that intelligence scores increased i
n a steady straight-line fashion as the number of training sessions increased fr
om 8 to 12 to 17 to 19.
Advances in this arena of raising IQ in teenagers and adults may come faster now
that we have some many published reports that working memory capacity can indee
d be expanded by training. The trick is in finding which approaches work best. C
urrently, we believe that working memory can be expanded by attentiveness traini
ng, music, and certain game environments. Actually, I believe demanding educatio
n can do the same thing.
Various techniques are reported in the research literature, and the best results
seem to come from n-back methods. One study by Verhaeghen and colleagues show t
hat memory span could be increased from one to four steps back with 10 hours (1
hr/session) of N-back training.
A whole cognitive enhancement industry is flourishing. The idea of brain fitness
software is that playing mentally challenging games will make you smarter. This
is not necessarily true. Several recent reviews suggest that such games do litt
le. I can only recommend with some certainty those games that focus on expanding
working memory capacity, and even here, one should not expect too much. I know
about three such programs, MindSparke, Cogmed, and Jungle Memory. I have no pers
onal experience or financial interest in any of these, but each has the potentia
l to be helpful, especially in kids or adults with attention deficit.
Training Working Memory Can Be Fun
Biological reward comes from the release of the neurotransmitter, dopamine. Dopa
mine release is promoted by performing working memory tasks, which suggests that
working memory tasks are actually rewarding. In the study of human subjects by
Fiona McNab and colleagues in Stockholm, human males (age 20-28) were trained fo
r 35 minutes per day for five weeks on working memory tasks with a difficulty le
vel close to their individual capacity limit. After such training, all subjects
showed increased working memory capacity. Functional MRI scans also showed that
the memory training increased the cerebral cortex density of dopamine D1 recepto
rs, the receptor subtype that mediates feelings of euphoria and reward.
Some games that are fun to play may also help working memory. The most obvious e
xample is chess. To play chess well, you have to learn to expand working memory
capacity to hold a plan for several offensive moves while at the same time holdi
ng a memory of how the opponent could respond to each of the moves. Not surprisi
ngly there are studies showing that IQ scores can go up after several months of
chess playing. Some schools, especially in minority schools in impoverished neig
hborhoods have seen marked improvements in school work by students who joined sc
hool chess clubs.
Students who make good grades feel good about their success. Likewise, people wh
o are "life-long learners" have discovered learning lots of new things makes the
m feel good.
_
Most students, at one time or another, have crammed for an examination. Research

ers refer to this as massed trials, where objects of learning are studied all at
the same time in one session. Students may be forced to cram because they have
procrastinated or did not have a regular, organized, and disciplined approach to
study. Non-students may cram too, as in lawyers briefing a case, speakers rehea
rsing a speech, professors preparing a lecture, salesmen practicing a pitch, and
so on.
In most situations research has made it abundantly clear that spacing the learni
ng over many shorter sessions is much more effective than trying to do it all in
one big session. Surprisingly, longer intervals between learning sessions are m
ore effective than shorter intervals. For example, one study of students learnin
g foreign-language words found that recall was highest at 56-day intervals as op
posed to 28-day or 14-day intervals. The total amount of study time was cut in h
alf: 13 sessions spaced 56 days apart produced comparable recall as 26 sessions
with a 14-day interval.
Unfortunately, most academic courses are not designed to support longer study in
tervals (perhaps educators need to re-think how things are done). Not enough stu
dies have been performed to examine which spacing protocol works best for certai
n kinds of learning tasks, but it is clear that massed trials are not efficient.
Why spacing makes such a big difference is not understood either, but it does ha
ve to do with basic biology. A recent study on seal snails, of all things, showe
d that the gene expression underlying long-term memory was affected by how five
training shocks were spread out over time. Compared with a control test where sn
ails got five shocks at 20-minute intervals, the most effective pattern (develop
ed by computer model) was to give three shocks at 10-minute intervals, followed
by a fourth at five minutes later and the fifth shock 30-minutes later.
There is no reason to think this protocol is optimal for humans learning a varie
ty of tasks. But it does help make the point that spaced learning is more effect
ive and perhaps irregular intervals might be better than evenly spaced ones.
Why does spacing work? Two ideas prevail. One is that in massed trials, there is
not much time for each presentation to be processed in context. In spaced trial
s, each learning presentation occurs in a slightly different context, thus provi
ding many more implicit cues that can be unconsciously accessed during retrieval
attempts.
Finally, a host of recently reported studies show that each time you are re-expo
sed to a learning object, the memory is re-consolidated. Successive consolidatio
n events reinforce each other. Multiple consolidations do not occur in massed tr
ials because consolidation takes many minutes or even hours.
Given what I have explained elsewhere on the benefits of self-testing, I suspect
that spaced learning would be optimized if the learner self-tested first during
each rehearsal session and then checked the recall against the original learnin
g material.
_
Two elderly couples were enjoying friendly conversation when one of the men aske
d the other, "Fred, how was the memory clinic you went to last month?"
"Outstanding," Fred replied. "They taught us all the latest psychological techni
ques - visualization, association - it made a huge difference for me."
"That's great! What was the name of the clinic?"
Fred went blank. He thought and thought, but couldn't remember. Then Fred smiled
and asked, "What do you call that red flower with the long stem and thorns?"

"You mean a rose?"

"Yes, that's it!" He turned to his wife. . ."Rose, what was the name of that cli
nic?"
Memory techniques, like visualized associations, are important for improving mem
ory. I sometimes get chided, as in a recent commentary, for writing about things
that readers think are unrelated to memory.
But memory is not independent of everything else that brains do. This includes g
eneral thinking abilities, motivation, attitudes, lifestyle, and the mental chal
lenges that a person seeks. General health, exercise, sleep, response to stress,
and diet are also important. I have elaborated on these influences on memory in
my books and learning and memory blog (http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com (link
is external)). Research continually expands our understanding of these indirect
influences on learning and memory, and I try to keep readers informed of the pra
ctical applications of these developments.
Another under-appreciated area about memory is the role of learning. As two side
s of the same coin, learning and memory are interdependent. How we approach a le
arning task has enormous impact on how much of it we remember. These factors inc
lude study strategy, attentiveness, distractibility and cognitive interference,
and organization and categorization of learning material. Likewise, how much you
remember of learned material affects one's capacity for understanding and memor
izing new material. Experts in a given field have become experts because what th
ey have memorized includes learning templates and schema that help them to be be
tter learners than non-experts. They may have learned to increase working memory
capacity, which in turn improves the ability to think and solve problems. That
is, the more they know, the more they can know.
Memory ability is multi-dimensional. The complete learner employs all the means
of improving knowledge.
_
Some people say that we learn best from our mistakes. But all of us know about p
eople who never seem to learn from their mistakes. This failure to learn is most
obvious with people who keep making poor decisions and lifestyle choices. The p
sychological explanations are many and complex.
For simplicity, let us restrict explanation to the world of education. Education
al philosophy has changed a great deal in the 50 years since I was in school. Ba
ck then, for example, I had the highest grades in school, but many of my teacher
s went out of their way to cut me down a notch or two so I wouldn't get conceite
d. Aside from the debatable question of whether that worked, the point is that t
oday, the educational establishment has the opposite philosophy. They tend to te
ll all kids they are smart. I have seen elementary schools where most students a
re selected as "Honors Students." I know college education professors who won't
give anything less than an A. Why is praise so liberally applied? In part, the
idea is to bolster student self-esteem. Also motivating teachers is the reluctan
ce to admit that some kids are smarter than others. Equal outcome is the politic
ally correct expectation. That's why we have the No Child Left Behind law. Every
body is supposed to succeed because all are presumed equal. Of course the realit
y is that this is a lie, and the only way everybody achieves the same is to lowe
r the standards to the least common denominator.
Research clearly shows that whether students learn best from their mistakes depe
nds on a student's self-perception. Research by Carol Dweck and colleagues at St
anford demonstrated that the students who are most likely to learn from their mi
stakes are those who don't think of themselves as smart as such but smart enough
to get smarter. They have a "growth mindset," a belief system that they can get
better if they will just invest the time and effort. In one of the group's expe

riments, half of the students were repeatedly praised for "being smart," and the
se students were not good at learning from mistakes. It is not clear why. Maybe
they thought the problem was in the learning material, not in them. The other ha
lf of students were praised for effort and improvement and these students got be
tter and made fewer mistakes. Several months later, all students repeated a stan
dardized test, and the "smart" students' scores dropped 20%, while the "growth m
indset" students scored 30% higher.
Jason Moser followed up this idea with an experiment in which subjects performed
a tedious task in which some mistakes were inevitable. Those who did best at le
arning from the mistakes were those who believed most strongly that they could g
et better at this task and make fewer mistakes. Brain electrical recordings duri
ng the task revealed two electrical signatures of the mindset, the first being a
n error-related negative voltage about 50 milliseconds after an error occurred,
and a second positive voltage up to about a half a second later. The size of thi
s second signal correlated with how intensely the subject paid conscious attenti
on and was distressed by the mistake. This second signal was larger in those sub
jects that were the best learners, and they made even fewer mistakes as the task
was repeated.
Ego is probably a factor. The "smart" students may seem to have plenty of self-e
steem, but apparently failure is too painful a challenge to their ego and they f
ind ways to rationalize or dismiss the mistakes. Students with a growth mindset
may have better self-esteem, because they accept the challenge to their ego, and
believe they can get better, which usually becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
A little humility is a good thing. Most of us, even the smartest, have a lot to
be humble about. There is even a book on the subject, "Why Do Smart People Make
Such Stupid Mistakes."
_
Now I know why science education in general is so screwed up, especially the bra
in and behavioral sciences. I just read the science education federal guidebook
from the National Research Council of the National Academies. This landmark epis
tle, A Framework for K-12 Science Education, is intended to be the definitive gu
ide for the states to construct their knowledge and skills school standards. Thi
s book advocates the practices, crosscutting concepts and core ideas that studen
ts should know at each K-12 grade level.
While I applaud the purpose, I find much to criticize about these recommendation
s from this body of supposed experts. I won't burden you with the details on eve
rything I find lacking, but one whole category of recommendations seems to have
been overlooked. The guidelines say almost nothing about brain and behavior. I a
m not surprised, In my own K-12 experience as a student many years ago, science
teachers always put instruction about the brain at the end of the course, which
they never got to because the school year ended before they got there. The same
thing happened in college life-science courses.
Nothing has changed. The new guidelines for life science stress cells/tissues/or
gans, genetics and molecular biology, and ecology/evolution. But brain and behav
ioral science is conspicuous by its absence. Yet this is the one category of hum
an experience where children especially need guidance and education. Students ar
e humans, and the most distinctive and important feature of being human is the b
rain and the behavior it controls. K-12 students could care less about DNA trans
cription, cellular respiration, and other minutia so dear to the hearts of biolo
gists (I am a PhD biologist, by the way). Students live in the world of puberty,
sports, social stress, bullying and other forms of abuse, emotional turbulence,
and mental confusion. Why don't we require students to understand more about th
eir brain and behavior, particularly as to the relationships to attitudes, emoti
ons, and learning and memory? Given that their brains are in enormous developmen
tal upheaval, why don't we teach them how what they do affects how their brain d

evelops?
In the last several decades, brain scientists have learned a lot about how child
ren learn and remember. Isn't it time we started teaching that science to childr
en? They live in a world where they are expected to learn and remember. Schools
tell school children WHAT to learn (much of which is irrelevant to their life at
the moment), but not HOW to learn.
Science has also learned a lot about what makes people tick how attitudes, prejudi
ces, desires, addictions, and various behavioral patterns are formed. We know a
lot about how the brain directs choices and behaviors and how people can learn t
o cope and exhibit more adaptive behavior. But we don't teach it.
U.S. education needs to be rescued from the clutches of the establishment "exper
ts." I checked the background of the people who wrote this unimaginative guide t
o science education. The design team had only four members. None were scientists
. Rather, each was a science-education bureaucrat or an education professor. The
life-science members of the steering committee consisted of education professor
s or administrators and only two scientists. One scientist was a geneticist and
the other a forest ecologist. Their science got the most representation.
This is how science education policy is formed in this age of federal control of
education. The nation's education problems will not be fixed until policy is ma
de by people who know what they are doing. Meanwhile, incestuous federal governm
ent insiders are calling the shots.
{
tate budget deficits are causing schools all across the nation to cut expenses,
often including cutting teaching staff. Colleges are increasingly under fire for
rising tuition and conflicts on professor time between teaching and research.
What this all boils down to is the pressing need to "do more with less." But how
? Schools already have too many problems. Schools should not get distracted from
fundamentals of teaching and learning.
A recent study from University of Washington professors compared two approaches
for teaching large introductory biology classes: 1) traditional lecture method,
and 2) "active learning" without lecture. Eliminating lecture does not in itself
improve teacher-student ratios. Indeed, some have said it doesn't matter whethe
r one lectures to 20 students or a thousand.
What is important is to address the question of what happens to educational qual
ity if you reduce the number of teachers. There is certainly no evidence that in
creasing the number of students in a lecture hall will improve teaching effectiv
eness, and in fact the opposite is likely. Statistically, increasing class sizes
in lecture courses has a disproportionate deleterious effect on socio-economica
lly disadvantaged students. So, as number of teachers decreases in response to e
conomic necessity, we can expect the educational gap to grow between advantaged
and disadvantaged.
So, how should educators respond to having more students and fewer teachers? The
educational literature has been building for decades toward the conclusion that
lecturing is a poor way to teach. We teachers know about many alternative "acti
ve learning" strategies, but just don't use them much, because lecturing seems s
o intuitive and for most of us, it has become a habit. And lecturing is the envi
ronment in which most of us were trained.
In the U. Washington study, the professors compared grade performance in classes
based on lectures with classes based on active learning. The type of active lea
rning they used included pre-class reading quizzes, daily multiple-choice "click
er" questions, a peer group instruction format that included so-called "construc

tivist" learning exercises, and weekly practice exams. Also, they adjusted learn
ing requirements to require more creative and critical thinking, since most coll
ege students have little experience with higher cognitive tasks of synthesizing
and applying learned material in new contexts (as specified in Bloom's taxonomy
of learning). The learning activities went beyond the lower levels of learning v
ocabulary and understanding of concepts.
Large student populations were involved for both comparison groups, and the clas
ses studied spanned several semesters. Student performance was measured in terms
of difference from the predicted performance based on college grades prior to e
ntering this biology class and SAT scores (which are highly reliable predictors,
based their previous analysis of five year's of class data). This analysis also
revealed a reliable prediction that disadvantaged students were twice as likely
to fail this course than non-disadvantaged students.
Not surprising (to me at least) was the consistent result of better final grades
in the classes that had active learning instead of lectures. The benefit was es
pecially noticeable on exam questions that demanded higher-level thinking. Moreo
ver, the disadvantaged students improved disproportionately.
The authors did not examine possible explanations for why active learning yielde
d better results than lecturing. I think the explanation is obvious, based on wh
at I know about mechanisms of learning and memory. First, learning from lectures
requires sustained paying attention, but a whole generation of multitasking stu
dents has emerged who are not very adept at sustained attentiveness. Accordingly
, the short attention spans of these students make it difficult for them to be e
ngaged with the lecture content. Engagement lies at the heart of effective learn
ing.
Secondly, active learning requires more engagement because the students have to
"do something" instead of just listen. They have to find, assimilate, and use in
formation to solve problems - all of which enhance understanding and are effecti
ve memory rehearsal strategies. The social dynamic of student learning teams fac
ilitates these activities. It is much harder to drift off task, daydream, or sle
ep in class when a student has to interact socially with peers to perform a lear
ning activity.
These ideas have been advocated for several decades. But now, it seems imperativ
e for teachers to use these approaches in an age where there will be fewer teach
ers and where more students are unable to benefit from lecturing. This requires
for many teachers a sea-change in teaching attitude and strategy. It is no longe
r suffices for a teacher to be a source and dispenser of information. Informatio
n already exists in many places, text books, Web sites, and videos, often in bet
ter presentation form than a typical teacher can produce. Even the expected role
of teachers in explaining everything is problematic. Students remember much bet
ter that which they have to figure out. Working in groups makes it easier to fig
ure out difficult material. Students can often explain things to each better tha
n teachers can because teachers have more difficulty in knowing why students are
having a comprehension problem.
The teacher must become a manager of learning activities. This means structuring
in-class time so that students work collaboratively on learning activities. Stu
dents also need homework that gets beyond "busy work." And, as I have been advoc
ating for some time now, students will benefit from more frequent testing, espec
ially under lower-stakes conditions.
Effective managers are those who can "scale up" to manage more and more people.
We can't wait for a new generation of teachers and professors. We need professio
nal development programs now that emphasize management of student learning.
_

We have all been told by teachers that learning occurs best when we spread it ou
t over time, rather than trying to cram everything into our memory banks at one
time. But what is the optimal spacing? There is no general consensus.
However we do know that immediately after a learning experience the memory of th
e event is extremely volatile and easily lost. It's like looking up a number in
the phone book: if you think about something else at the same time you may have
to look the number up again before you can dial it. School settings commonly cre
ate this problem. One learning object may be immediately followed by another, an
d the succession of such new information tends to erase the memory of the preced
ing ones.
Microsoft clip art
Source: Microsoft clip art
Memory researchers have known for a long time that repeated retrieval enhances l
ong-term retention. This happens because each time we retrieve a memory, it has
to be reconsolidated and each such reconsolidation strengthens the memory. Thoug
h optimal spacing intervals have not been identified, research confirms the impo
rtance of spaced retrieval. No doubt, the nature of the information, the effecti
veness of initial encoding, competing experiences, and individual variability af
fect the optimal interval for spaced learning.
One study revealed that repeated retrieval of learned information (100 Swahili Eng
lish word pairs) with long intervals produced a 200% improvement in long-term re
tention relative to repeated retrieval with no spacing between tests. Investigat
ors compared different-length intervals of 15, 30, or 90 minute spacing that exp
anded (for example, 15-30-45 min), stayed the same (30-30-30 min) or contracted
(45-30-15 min) revealed that no one relative spacing interval pattern was superi
or to any other [1].
Another study [2] has revealed that the optimally efficient gap between study se
ssions depends on when the information will be tested in the future. A very comp
rehensive study of this matter in 1,350 individuals involved teaching them a set
of facts and then testing them for long-term retention after 3.5 months. A fina
l test was given at a further delay of up to one year. At any test delay, increa
sing the inter-study gap between the first learning and a study of that material
at first increased and then gradually reduced final test performance. Expressed
as a ratio, the optimal gap equaled 10-20% of the test delay. That is, for exam
ple, a one-day gap was best for a test to be given seven days later, while a 21day gap was best for a test 70 days later. Few of any teachers or students know
this, and their study times are rarely scheduled in any systematic way, typicall
y being driven by test schedules for other subjects, convenience, or even the te
acher's whim.
The bottom line: the optimal time to review a newly learned experience is just b
efore you are about to forget it. Obviously, we usually don't know when this occ
urs, but in general the vast bulk of forgetting occurs within the first day afte
r learning. As a rule of thumb, you can suspect that a few repetitions early on
should be helpful in fully encoding the information and initiating a robust cons
olidation process. So, for example, after each class a student should quickly re
mind herself what was just learned then that evening do another quick review. Befo
re the next class on that subject, the student should review again. Teachers hel
p this process by linking the next lesson to the preceding one.
Certain practices will reduce the amount of time needed for study and the degree
of long-term memory formation. These include:
Don't procrastinate. Do it now!
Organize the information in ways that make sense (outlines, concept maps)

Identify what needs to be memorized and what does not.

Focus. Do not multi-task. No music, cell phones, TV or radio, or distractions of
any kind.
Association the new with things you already know.
Associate words with mental images and link images to locations, or in story cha
ins
Think hard about the information, in different contexts
Study small chunks of material, in short intervals. Then take a mental break.
Say out loud what you are trying to remember.
Practice soon after learning and frequently thereafter at spaced intervals.
Explain what you are learning to somebody else.
Work with study groups after you have prepared.
Self-test. Don't just "look over" the material. Truly engage with it.
Never, never, ever CRAM!
_
Could brain teasers help substance abusers beat addiction? Researchers at Virgin
ia Tech observed that addicts often exhibit "delay discounting," the tendency to
devalue far-off rewards in favor of instantly rewarding stimuli like drugs.
Borrowing an approach used to rehab stroke and traumatic brain injury victims, t
hey put substance abusers through cognitive boot camp, building up the part of t
he brain involved in executive function. After a month of training, participants
showed a 50 percent decrease in their delay discounting rate.
The participants, patients at a substance abuse facility, memorized strings of n
umbers, words, and letters in games that targeted working memory the system that f
irst processes new info. There's substantial overlap between the functions of wo
rking memory and delay discounting, says researcher Warren Bickel. By building u
p underlying cognitive circuits (mostly in the prefontal cortex), such exercises
may help the addicted resist instant payoffs, set long-term goals, and look ahe
ad to a healthier tomorrow. Future research will measure whether buffing up work
ing memory actually helps them kick the habit. Nancy Ryerson
Game Time Decisions
Could memory-building
avings for cigarettes
working memory helps
s. PT found a few fun
Lumina

methods like the ones in this study help you quell your cr
or Coke (Coca-Cola, that is)? Bickel thinks so: A stronger
anyone look ahead and resist instant gratification, he say
iPhone games that tap working memory.

In this chicly designed game, players watch a series of flashing colors and repe
at the pattern. As the pattern gets longer, the pace quickens.
Touch Attack!
This popular, kid-friendly package tests your memory and reflexes with three fas
t-paced pattern-matching games.

Memory Matrix
Quick! Identify which squares in a blank grid were shaded a moment before. After
a few rounds, check your "brain profile" comparing your skills to other players
'.
_
Did you realize that after age 70, the average person's brain shrinks more than
1% a year? At this rate, serious mental deterioration can become evident by age
80. Scientists have few clues about why this shrinkage occurs, nor why it is les
s in some Seniors than in others.
One of the few leads involve B vitamins. Certain B vitamins can reduce brain shr
inkage and memory loss in people over 70, according to a randomized, double-blin
d clinical trial study in Britain of the effect of the B vitamins folic acid, B6
and B12.
All 168 volunteer participants were over age 70 and all had mild memory problems
. Half of the subjects received daily a placebo, and the other half got a tablet
containing 0.8 mg folic acid, 20 mg pyridoxine HCl (B6), and 0.5 mg cyanocobala
min (B12).
Brain shrinkage was measured by MRI scans. The mean rate of brain atrophy per ye
ar was 0.76% in the active treatment group and 1.08% in the control subjects who
took placebo pills
The investigators also measured mental function, and the highest test scores occ
urred in the subjects that had the least brain shrinkage.
The mechanism of the beneficial effect is not known, but these vitamins are know
n to reduce blood levels of homocysteine, which has been correlated with the inc
idence of Alzheimer's disease. Of course, that is not proof that homocysteine ca
uses the disease or that these vitamins will help prevent it. Homocysteine is an
amino acid, but is not found in foods. It is a metabolite of the amino acid, me
thionine, which does occur in food. We do know that deficiency of folic acid, B6
, an B12 causes increase in homocysteine, so it is possible that older people ar
e deficient in these vitamins. But while we await further research, it seems pru
dent for Seniors to take these B vitamins daily.
_
When you were a child, like all children, you were told numerous times to "Pay a
tten-tion!" Now, if you are old enough to have reached Senior status, you may ha
ve that problem again. Aging processes make many Seniors as inattentive as they
were as children. Few people have the temerity to tell a Senior to "pay attentio
n," so you may have to be your own task master.
The implied assumption in all this is that people learn to focus and have to be
re-minded often in order to master the ability to concentrate. Over the years pe
ople can improve their ability to concentrate. The ability to focus is a habit o
f mind, one that must be acquired through years of being reminded and of doing i
t. If this habit has deteriorated, it is not too hard to re-learn it.
Of course, with today's school children, it is a different matter. Any experienc
ed teacher will tell you that kids' attention span is terrible, and much shorter
than was typical a generation ago. The problem, presumably, is our new age of m
ulti-tasking, where con-stant flitting from texting, to phone calls, to Web brow
sing, to video games, and the like is making our kids scatterbrained.
Everybody from first-grade school teachers to Ph.D. candidates knows that to lea
rn and remember things you need to pay attention. The trick is how to make yours
elf more at-tentive and focused. A great book on this topic has been written by
Winifred Galagher called Rapt. Attention and the Focused Life.

What does one do to improve the ability to concentrate? It takes the discipline
of fre-quent self-reminding. You learn to focus by making yourself do it - again
and again, until it becomes a habit, a way of thinking. Here are some specific
tips:
1. Value attentiveness. Realize that you create personal reality by what you pay
attention to. Your reality is constructed from what you attend to. All of us ge
t much less out of life than we could because we are not paying attention.
2. Live in the now. An expert on this philosophy, Eckhart Tolle, says, "The cloc
k's hands move, but it is always now." Grab the present intensely. You cannot kn
ow the future and you cannot re-do the past. You can correct for past weak-nesse
s and mistakes, and reduce their likelihood in the future, but it has to be done
in the now.
3. Be more aware. Consciously attend to what you are doing, why, and how. Be awa
re of how you feel. Emotions affect the ability to focus. If how you feel interferes with concentration, change how you feel. It IS a choice.
4. Notice the little things. Develop an eye for detail. See the forest, but also
see the trees (and the leaves, bark, insects, birds, squirrels, and everything
else there). Notice the small pleasures of life. It teaches you how to focus and
makes you happier. Target things that are fun and provide positive reinforcemen
t.
5. Set goals, monitor progress. Keep track of how you are getting goals achieved
and what adjustments need to be made along the way.
6. Identify targets of attention. Think of what you are experiencing as targets
for attentiveness and take mental aim at them. Targets should be interesting or
have a clear value. If these attributes are not apparent, you must consciously e
nable them. Make tough choices about your targets of attention. Attend to those
things that best serve your own best interests. Choose challenging targets of at
tention, ones that push you to the edge of your competence.
7. Shut out distractions. Don't be sidetracked by interruptions or mind wander-i
ng. In memory tournaments, contestants wear ear plugs. Germans are said to wear
glasses with side blinders. Some contestants face a blank wall.
8. Don't multitask. This is the arch enemy of attentiveness and profoundly inter
-feres with the ability to learn and especially to remember. Multitasking create
s a superficial way of thinking that also imperils the ability to think deeply i
n intellectually demanding situations.
9. Fight boredom. Make targets of attention more engaging by creating competi-ti
on or making them into some sort of game. Enliven dull work by thinking of it in
novel ways. Find ways to change the pace of your attention. Don't let it be-com
e a drill.
10. Make emotion work for you. Develop a passion for what you experience, as tha
t will rivet your attention. Both negative and positive emotions work. The kiss
of death for learning is to be bored and detached from what you are trying to le
arn. Ask any school teacher how big a problem that is for so many students.
11. Practice attentiveness. Acquiring good concentration ability is little diffe
rent from developing a good golf swing. You have to practice. Psychologist Ellen
Langer suggests staring at your finger, for example. Attentiveness is cultivate
d from the more you notice: the dirt, distribution of hair, pattern of skin fold
s, shape of the knuckles, and features of the nail (shape, color of quick, ridge

s, etc.). Do similar exercises with any object you encounter. You will find that
daily life experiences become more engaging. You will get more out of life.
12. Learn how to meditate. See how long you can sustain focus on your breathing
and keep out all intruding thoughts. Notice all things associated with the breat
hing, but nothing else. Hear the sound of the moving air with each breath. Feel
the pulse in your neck. If you don't feel it, crook your neck or lie down to fee
l it in your back or hear it by turning your ear to a pillow. Notice the rhythm
and the gradual slowing. Feel your clothes shifting position and the tension flo
wing out of your muscles, first in the jaw, then in the back and legs. Not only
does meditation teach your brain how to concentrate, it also lowers blood pres-s
ure and contributes to peace of mind.
_
he saying "it is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all"
could easily apply to memory slips: "it is better not to have lost in the first
place than to have lost and found." You know how frustrating it is when you los
e a cherished personal possession, an important computer document, or even an or
dinary umbrella. In part, you're invariably going to be unhappy about the loss o
f the object itself. But it's a safe bet that you're just as unhappy about wasti
ng time to look for the misplaced item.
It can take precious moments or even days out of your busy schedule to retrace y
our steps and figure out what on earth you did with the thing. Of course, when y
ou've found the misplaced item, you feel a surge of happiness and joy. The agony
of losing is replaced by the ecstasy of finding. You vow to yourself that you w
ill never, ever, misplace anything again.
Memory researchers cite the psychological adage "If you don't encode, you can't
retrieve." There are several great tests to prove the wisdom of this saying. One
is to try to pick out the correct version of a penny from an array. Similarly,
state how many rows of stars there are on the U.S. flag and how they are arrange
d. Another classical example is forgetting where you parked your car before head
ing into a shopping mall. This scenario was parodied in one of the all-time grea
t Seinfeld episodes, "The Parking Garage." These examples show that if you don'
t think about something in the first place, there's no way you're going to remem
ber it later.
The problem for most people is that we mindlessly go about our day's activities,
often preoccupied with several concerns at once. We all dissociate to a certai
n extent ("multi-task") and so the part of our brain carrying out routine activi
ties doesn't connect with the part of our brain responsible for conscious though
t.
As a result, you park the car, thinking not about which row you left it in, but
instead thinking about how much of a hurry you are to get your shopping done. O
r you pick up your cell phone while walking around the house, stop to wash the d
ishes, and then never realize that you put the phone down near the sink, behind
the detergent.With luck, you've left the sound on, so you can call it. The bottl
e of detergent gives off a happy "brrrring" and you and your phone are reunited.
Unfortunately, many objects that we misplace don't have ringers at all, so the
search for the misplaced item can be far longer and less fruitful.
Sometimes the reunion with your lost object depends on another person's honesty.
It could be a kindly soul who spots your sad and lonely cell phone in a parking
lot and decides to call you. One of the most famous instances of such an honest
person was in the case of Yo-Yo Ma, who left his $2.5 million cello in a New Yo
rk taxi cab. Most of us don't lose items worth quite that much, but no matter wh
at the value, if it matters to us, there are emotional ups and downs associated
with these memory slips.

As painful as these experiences are, we are notoriously bad at learning from the
m. You vow never to put your cell phone or keys in some strange place without ma
king a special mental note of what you're doing. And then the next time, well, y
ou forget about that mental note. However, it's all about the mental note. If yo
u want to avoid painful and time-consuming memory slips, you need to make that e
ffort.
Psychologists actually use the term effortful processing to refer to memory succ
esses. The more you actively engage your cognitive resources, the more likely yo
u are to be able to reconstruct exactly what you've done, where you've been and
what you need to do.
In one famous study of "levels of processing," Toronto researcher Fergus Craik f
ound that by having subjects put words into sentences they were more likely to r
emember them than if they counted the number of letters in the words. This kind
of semantic or "deep"processing takes more effort but pays off with better resul
ts. You'll have fewer lost umbrellas and cellphones if you even rehearse to your
self mentally "I'm putting the cellphone on the counter." You'll also remember p
eople's names more effectively.
What if you failed to engage your deep semantic processes? Your best of intentio
ns slipped as did your memory and now you have absolutely no idea where you put
your favorite ring after you took it off. Your first step to a successful reuni
on with the ring is to calm yourself down. Do not, under any circumstances, star
t to panic. Once you lose your grip on your emotions, you will become distracted
and less able to focus. Your stress hormones will kick in (cortisol, specifical
ly) and your memory will worsen with each passing wave of anxiety.
Instead of panicking, sit down and think. Reconstruct the series of steps you f
ollowed when you put the item down. Remind yourself of what you were thinking an
d feeling. Context-dependent memory, in which you put yourself in the same frame
of mind, is your best friend right now. You need to reconstruct the entire scen
ario mentally, walking through it like a crime scene. Eventually little details
will float to the surface of your memory and you will have that wonderful "aha"
moment when you remember exactly where you put it.
You can also prevent losses in the first place if you
r daily tasks. Before you leave a taxicab or bus, for
o look behind you to see if anything fell out of your
e looking around for something that you are "sure" is
do an exhaustive and systematic search.

become more mindful in you

example, take one second t
bag or pockets. When you'r
in a certain room or area,

While searching, be systematic. Don't throw things around in a wild panic; inste
ad treat the room like a crime scene and try to move things as minimally as poss
ible. At the same time, really look around. Inattentional blindness can cause y
ou to think you've looked where you actually have not.
Above all, don't jump to conclusions that you're losing your mental abilities. D
on't make Freudian interpretations suggesting that you really "wanted" to lose t
hat wedding ring or present from your grandmother. This will only raise your anx
iety level and impede the entire process.
To sum up, here are the keys to --well-- finding your keys
1. Maintain conscious awareness when going about your daily tasks. Much of what
we lose occurs because we're not thinking about what we do. If you do, you will
be less likely to misplace things.
2. When you've lost something, calm down and think. Visualize what you were doi
ng right before you lost the item. Don't think about what you "usually" do, beca

use if you were doing it "usually" you probably wouldn't have lost the item in t
he first place.
3. Have confidence in yourself. We generally process much more information belo
w the level of conscious awareness than we remember. You only need to have faith
in your ability to dredge out some of that unconscious material and all will be
well.
4. Recognize that you're not alone. I'm always astounded at the number of car k
eys I've seen at my gym's lost and found key bin. Your misery definitely has com
pany.
5. Rely on the sympathy (and honesty) of others. Let people know what you're loo
king for. You never know who's spotted the item and is waiting to return it.
What you've lost can be found again but only if you engage your mental resources
. You may not experience the ecstasy of finding what you've lost, but at least y
ou'll save yourself needless agony.
_
Working memory is the ability to hold information in your head and manipulate it
mentally. You use this mental workspace when adding up two numbers spoken to yo
u by someone else without being able to use pen and paper or a calculator. Child
ren at school need this memory on a daily basis for a variety of tasks such as f
ollowing teachers' instructions or remembering sentences they have been asked to
write down.
The main goal of this article was to investigate the predictive power of working
memory and IQ in learning in typically developing children over a six-year peri
od. This issue is important because distinguishing between the cognitive skills
underpinning success in learning is crucial for early screening and intervention
.
In this study, typically developing students were tested for their IQ and workin
g memory at 5 years old and again when they were 11 years old. They were also te
sted on their academic attainments in reading, spelling and maths.
The findings revealed that a child's success in all aspects of learning is down
to how good their working memory is regardless of IQ score. Critically, working
memory at the start of formal education is a more powerful predictor of subseque
nt academic success than IQ in the early years.
This unique finding is important as it addresses concerns that general intellige
nce, still viewed as a key predictor of academic success, is unreliable. An indi
vidual can have an average IQ score but perform poorly in learning.
Some psychologists suggest that the link between IQ and learning is greatest whe
n the individual is learning new information, rather than at later stages when i
t is suggested that gains made are the result of practice.
Yet the findings from this research that working memory capacity predicted subse
quent skills in reading, spelling, and math suggests that some cognitive skills
contribute to learning beyond practice effects.
The study also found that, as opposed to IQ, working memory is not linked to the
parents' level of education or socio-economic background. This means all childr
en regardless of background or environmental influence can have the same opportu
nities to fulfil potential if working memory is assessed and problems addressed
where necessary.
Working memory is a relatively stable construct that has powerful implications f

or academic success. While working memory does increase with age, its relative c
apacity remains constant. This means that a child at the bottom 10 percentile co
mpared to their same-aged peers is likely to remain at this level throughout the
ir academic career.
In summary, the present article suggests that the traditional reliance on IQ as
a benchmark for academic success may be misguided. Instead, schools should focus
on assessing working memory as it is the best predictor of reading, spelling an
d math skills six years later. At present, poor working memory is rarely identif
ied by teachers, who often describe children with this problem as inattentive or
as having lower levels of intelligence. However, there are standardized assessm
ents that are suitable for educators to use to screen their students for working
memory problems. For example, the Automated Working Memory Assessment (publishe
d by the Psychological Corporation) allows non-specialist assessors such as clas
sroom teachers to screen their students for significant working memory problems
quickly and effectively.
Problems with working memory can be easily addressed in schools-an advantage ove
r IQ which is more difficult to influence by teachers. Early intervention in wor
king memory could lead to a reduction in the number of those failing schools and
help address the problem of under-achievement in schools.
_
Sometimes, what our brain wants is not always good for our bodies. Donuts are a
good example. It is early morning and you're driving to work after a nice breakf
ast of black coffee and two eggs, easy-over, with bacon. Yet, you're still hungr
y and having difficulty paying attention to the traffic. Why? Your brain is not
cooperating because it is not satisfied with that breakfast because it lacked on
e critical ingredient that your brain urgently needs, sugar. You have been fasti
ng since dinner last night and your blood levels of sugar have fallen to very lo
w levels. From your brain's perspective, sugar is indispensable. It will do what
ever is necessary to convince you to eat sugar as often as possible. Why? Your b
rain needs sugar (usually in the form of glucose) to function normally. The bill
ions and billions of neurons in your brain require a constant supply of sugar to
maintain their ability to produce energy and communicate with other neurons. Yo
ur neurons can only tolerate a total deprivation of sugar for a few minutes befo
re they begin to die. Therefore, as blood levels of sugar decrease with the pass
age of time since your last meal, you begin to experience a craving for food, pr
eferably something sweet. Essentially, the presence of sugar in your brain is co
nsidered normal, and its absence leads to the feeling of craving and the initiat
ion of hunting or foraging behaviors, such as seeking out a vending machine for
some cupcakes or a candy bar.
Once inside the brain, sugar is also used to produce a very important neurotrans
mitter chemical call acetylcholine. Acetylcholine allows you to learn and rememb
er, to regulate your attention and mood, and to control how well you can move. Y
our brain makes acetylcholine from choline, which is obtained from the diet, and
from acetyl groups that originate from the metabolism of sugar. We frequently o
btain choline in our diet by eating lecithin. Lecithin can be found in many diff
erent bakery goods such as donuts and cupcakes and is commonly added to chocolat
e. Thus a tasty chocolate covered donut first thing in the morning is going to p
rovide your brain with everything it needs to pay attention and learn new things
. Sadly, those eggs and bacon that you had for breakfast were completely insuffi
cient for the task of preparing your acetylcholine neurons to function.
As the day progresses your acetylcholine neurons are busy consuming choline and
sugar as you spend your day thinking and learning. However, as evening arrives y
ou cannot help but notice that you're having trouble paying attention and you're
experiencing a little mental slowing. What's happening to your acetylcholine ne
urons and what can you do about it? The cure for our mental slowing: coffee. Whi
le we were busy thinking and learning all day another neurotransmitter chemical

was increasing in concentration and it has slowly and powerfully begun to turn o
ff our acetylcholine neurons. This chemical is called adenosine. Adenosine inhib
its the function of acetylcholine neurons our brains and the longer we are awake
the more persuasive is its influence. The caffeine in our coffee is able to pre
vent the actions of adenosine and release our acetylcholine neurons from their c
hemical shackles; our attentiveness improves and we are ready for anything - at
least until the caffeine effect wears off.
So, tomorrow morning do not fight the urge to stop for coffee and donuts. It's w
hat your brain wants you to do. Now please go back and read the first sentence a
gain.
_
A very sophisticated and comprehensive set of 12 experiments confirms what exper
ienced teachers have long known: students over-estimate how much they know and u
nder-estimate the value of repeated study of the same material. This bias may ap
ply to everyone, but the study was performed on college students. UCLA researche
rs studied the reliability of people's ability to judge how well they had rememb
ered something just studied and to predict how well they could remember if they
went over the same material in several sessions.
They asked the students to look at a list of word pairs and make two estimates:
one a judgement of how well they remembered what they just studied and the other
a prediction of how well they would be able to remember the words after subsequ
ent study of those same word lists.
When asked after a given study trial to judge how well they thought they remembe
red, students' judgment of their knowledge was not confirmed by actual performan
ce on the test.That is, they over-estimated how much they had learned.
Amazingly, students predicted little or no learning improvement would occur with
repeated study sessions, yet they actually showed large increases in actual lea
rning with repeated study. The change in predicted performance was about the sam
e, irrespective of whether the word pairs were deemed easy or hard to remember.
However, the actual performance benefit of extra study was especially marked for
the hard-to-remember words.
Other studies have shown that people fail to predict accurately how much their m
emory of specific learning will deteriorate over time after the intiial learning
.
Why does this matter? Well, it affects how well one manages learning tasks; that
is, choosing the best activities that will create lasting memories, as for exam
ple, students choosing how and when to study. The implication is that students d
on't study as much as they should because they don't appreciate the value of ext
ra study, especially for hard-to-learn material. They also don't study as much a
s they need to because they think they have learned more than they really have.
Is the problem that students are generally not as smart as they think they are?
Or do they fail to study more because they don't correctly realize how much it w
ould help? The ultimate consequence is that students tend to study too little an
d give up too quickly.
The authors suggest that these inaccurate beliefs and the negative consequences
just reflect normal psychology. They do not consider that mental laziness could
be a factor. Nor do they consider that this effect might be age-specific.
This may also relate to an observation that has puzzled me ever since I wrote my
original book on memory improvement. Students have not been as interested in wh
at the book had to say as I expected. Nor do they show as much interest as I ant
icipated in attending my lectures on the subject. At one unversity where I recen

tly gave a well-advertised talk on how to improve memory, not one student showed
up -- only faculty. Older adults, in general, seem to realize they need to work
on their memory. Students tend to think they are either just fine as they are o
r can't improve.
A related matter is that students don't appreciate the value of testing in enhan
cing memory. This value was confirmed in the present study, and I have elsewhere
discussed similar findings. Testing forces retrieval of stored information and
that retrieval is a strong rehearsal process that reinforces the memory.
_
Did you ever hide something important - not to lose it, just to forget where you
hid it? Well, could using hypnosis help you recall the location of that item? T
he power of hypnosis can certainly increase focus but, how could it help you rem
ember? The answer to that question rests in the mechanisms of memory, hypnosis a
nd the skill of the hypnotist.
Over the years many clients have come to me asking for hypnosis to find lost jew
elry, valuable papers, or items that were simply misplaced. Most of the time I h
ave been successful in helping these people retrieve their items. The same appli
es to actual memories that may have been forgotten. The research literature is f
ull of studies that document the power of hypnosis to enhance memory. Most studi
es are laboratory based experiments that usually show a significant increase in
the recall of hypnotized subjects as compared to normal controls. Articles about
psychology are full of stories of people who recover lost things or recall memo
ries that presumably were lost.
The key to understanding the ability of hypnosis to improve memory is found in h
ow our memory works in the first place. Memory is actually a complicated system
that remains not fully understood. There are the very short term memories (like
recalling a phone number) which last a few seconds. The long term memory works i
n a two stage process. First, you store the experience somewhere in you mind and
secondly, we have to recall that memory. Problems may occur in either system: t
he storage or retrieval. Remember hypnosis is a trance that focuses attention on
a limited area, can slow down thinking, heighten the imagination, and prevent d
istractions. Hypnosis, if used by a skilled practitioner, can help focus attenti
on on either part of the memory system, how the information was stored or how to
recall it.
Did you forget something? The first question is what and how were you trying to
store that information? What cognitive mode were you using (visual, auditory, wr
itten, sensory, etc)? What was the context of the situation? What were any assoc
iations about the information? For example, Kathy wanted to hide the combination
to her safe where nobody would find it. She wrote it down on a small white piec
e of paper and taped to a file called "home equipment" and stored it in her file
cabinet under "valuables." After returning from a long trip, she could not reme
mber the combination. She also could not remember where she hid the instructions
. When she came to my office, I helped her enter a light trance where she could
still speak with me and we went over her actions and decisions about storing the
combination. Eventually, she was able to retrace her steps and remembered exact
ly where the paper was hidden.
This kind of memory retrieval was accomplished by helping the subject focus on t
he experience and sequence of details increasing the vividness of each memory un
til all the information was recalled. Police have used hypnotists to help witnes
ses recall details of crime scenes. This has actually led to the thorny issue of
false memories and many states have even created laws regarding how hypnosis is
used in legal matters. It is possible for an unethical hypnotist to insert fabr
icated memories into an unsuspecting person, however this does not happen sponta
neously. Therapists routinely use regression (taking the subject back in time to
early memories) to help resolve conflicts or traumatic memories.

There is no question that hypnosis has the power to enhance memories by improvin
g the mechanisms by which we create and retrieve them. This is partly based on t
he subject's suggestibility or persuasiveness which can be used to encourage dee
per probing until recall is successful. If you forgot something, first try to re
construct the memory best you can. If you really cannot recall the information,
give a call to a qualified hypnotherapist and they should be able to help you re
member.
The power of hypnosis is ultimately in the workings of the human mind. Trance al
lows deeper access to parts of the subconscious or unconscious mind that are nor
mally outside our ordinary wakeful consciousness. The trance gives us unconteste
d permission to snoop around the inner labyrinth of the mind. You actually never
know what you may come across. In general, we usually do not have bizarre hidde
n memories but, there are many things we would never remember if we did not make
an extra special effort to recall it. When it is really important, do not under
estimate what hypnosis can do for you.
Your questions and comments are welcome... Keep going in positive directions.
_
School is back in session in Texas and many other parts of the country, and kids
all over are flocking back to the classroom. The setup of a typical classroom i
s pretty similar to what it has been for 100 years. The teacher sits in the fron
t of the room. The students are in desks in rows.
Setting up a classroom in this way assumes that the purpose of school is to trai
n the minds of students. And as far as it goes, that is probably right. The prob
lem is that we also assume that training the mind is something separate from the
body.
Now, I don't mean that we believe that the mind is not a physical thing (like Re
ne Descartes did). I'm pretty sure that most of us believe that the brain is the
thing that allows us to think, and that the brain is a part of our body. But we
do often treat the brain as if it is somehow separate from the rest of the body
, and so we can train it while ignoring what the rest of the body is doing.
I think that is a mistake, and over the next few posts I'll talk about why.
There is a growing recognition within Psychology that thinking is affected by wh
at the body is doing. The way you think about things is influenced by what your
body is doing at any given moment, and it is also influenced by what you have do
ne in the past. The body even affects the mind when it is not obvious that movem
ents of the body are not really that relevant to the thinking being done.
As an example, consider studies by Shu-Ju Yang, David Gallo, and Sian Beilock in
the September, 2009 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning,
Memory, and Cognition. They had people sit in front of a computer with the keybo
ard hidden under a platform. They saw pairs of letters on the screen and rated h
ow much they liked them. Later, they were shown a number of pairs of letters and
asked whether they had seen them in the first part of the experiment.
So, what does this have to do with the body?
Some of the people in the study were skilled typists, and others were unskilled
typists. The letter pairs were all pairs that would be typed with the middle and
index fingers if they were typed (though the people in the study did not have t
o do any typing). Some of those pairs (like BK) were ones that would be easy to
type, because they require typing one letter with each hand. Others were pairs t
hat would be harder to type because they would by typed with the same finger (li
ke FV).

Both the skilled and unskilled typists were pretty good at recognizing letter pa
irs that they saw during the first part of the study. Where they differed was in
the items that were presented for the first time when they were being tested. T
he skilled typists more likely to mistakenly say that they had seen a letter pai
r when they had not if that letter pair was one that would be typed with differe
nt hands than when that letter pair was one that would be typed with the same fi
nger. The unskilled typists, who had little or no experience typing these letter
pairs showed no difference between pairs that would be typed with the different
hands or with the same finger.
I realize this is a pretty simple demonstration, but the ability to recognize th
ings you have seen before is an important part of the learning process. Results
like this make clear that experience performing actions affects your ability to
separate those things you remember from those things you do not.
I'll talk more about connections between mind and body in the next post.
_
One of the most exciting areas is brain-based memory research we now have is neu
roimaging and brain-mapping studies to view the working brain as it learns. Thes
e memory tips are derived from my background as a neurologist. I review the neur
oimaging research. I then use my experience as a classroom teacher to make conne
ctions between the research and strategies that are NEURO-LOGICAL.
DESTRESS: Stress causes the brain intake systems to send information into th
e Reactive brain (automatic-fight, flight, freeze) and prevents information flow
through to the Reflective higher thinking, conscious brain (prefrontal cortex)
where long-term memory is constructed. Establish enjoyable rituals (favorite son
gs, card games, ball toss) or surprises (a fun picture downloaded and printed fr
om the internet) before study time to destress the study experience and open up
the brain networks that lead to memory storage.
GRAB ATTENTION: Memorable events make long-term memories. Find out what your
child will study next in school and hang posters "advertising" or giving hints
about that topic and encourage him to guess what it might be. Curiosity open's u
p the brain's sensory intake filter so when the topic comes up in class or in re
ading it will grab her attention.
COLOR: The brain only lets in a small part of the billions of bits of sensor
y information available every second. A filter in the low (unconscious, automati
c, animal-like) brain decides what gets in. Color is something that gets through
this filter especially well. Have your children use colored pens color code not
es or words to emphasize high importance. You can have a picture of a traffic li
ght on the wall and he can use green, orange, and red in order of importance - l
ike the traffic light.
image
NOVELTY: If you add novelty to a study experience it will be more memorable.
Use video clips from the internet, put on a funny hat, put a scarf on the dog,
light a candle) right before your child begins to study. His alerting system wil
l be more open to processing and remember information that comes in after a nove
l experience.
PERSONAL MEANING: Children must care enough about information or consider it
personally important, for it to go through the brain filters and be stored as m
emory. Use your child's interests to connect her to the material. Make stories t
ogether using the information. Stories are great ways to remember new things bec
ause you child's brain grew up hearing stories and the pattern for remembering s
tories is strong in her brain.

RELATIONAL MEMORIES: The brain keeps information in short-term memory for le

ss than a minute unless it connects with prior knowledge. Activate your child's
prior knowledge by reminding him of things you've done as a family or that he's
learned in other subjects that relates to the new information
PATTERNING: The brain is a pattern-seeking organ. When your children recogni
ze relationships between new and prior knowledge their brains can link the new i
nformation with a category of existing knowledge for long-term storage. Charts,
mnemonics, listing similarities/differences, and making analogies build long-ter
m memory patterns.
MENTAL MANIPULATION FOR LONG-TERM MEMORY: Once the information gets to the h
igher thinking brain your child must do something with it to build permanent mem
ories. Your children can write summaries of new information in their own words.
To make these even more personally meaningful the summaries can be in forms that
suit their learning style preferences including sketches, skits, songs, dances,
comic strips, or drawings.
PRACTICE MAKES PERMANENT: Information from each of the senses is stored in a
part of the brain specific to that sense. Review material using multiple sensor
y activities so different neural networks store the knowledge in multiple brain
regions. Your children's brains will build multiple pathways leading to the stor
ed memory, which makes retrieval more efficient. When a memory has been recalled
often, this repeated neural circuit activation makes the memory stronger like exe
rcising a muscle.
SYN-NAPS: Neurotransmitters, brain transport proteins, needed for memory con
struction and attention are depleted after as little as ten minutes of doing the
same activity. Syn-naps are brain-breaks where you help your child change the l
earning activity to let her brain chemicals replenish. The Syn-naps can be stret
ching, singing, or acting out vocabulary words. After just a few minutes, her re
freshed brain will be ready for new memory storage.
As we were going to press, Contributing Editor Jill Neimark sent this important
note: I've been covering the subject of memory for this magazine since 1994, whe
n I profiled John Mack, M. D., the Harvard psychiatrist who has "helped" hundred
s of individuals recover buried memories of alien abduction. You'd think that me
mory would be the stuff of dry academia but it turns out to be one of the most i
lluminating and terrifying stories of our time.
The most recent burst of gunfire was sent in my direction, though its real targe
t was Elizabeth Loftus, the eminent University of Washington psychologist whom I
profiled in the January/February 1996 issue. Her work is dedicated to demonstra
ting the inherent malleability of memory, its distortions, its suggestibility. S
he has testified on just that point as an expert witness in some infamous trials
of the 80s and 90s. It turns out that's a dangerous line of work, for it flies
in the face of the recovered memory movement, which has allied itself with femin
ism and child abuse.
If anyone should be revered by feminists and therapists, it is Loftus, a brillia
nt woman who has put herself on the firing line with decades of ingenious and so
und research. But instead she is violently hated by some women and psychotherapi
sts.
Lately they've began trying to destroy her reputation, actually filing ethics co
mplaints alleging scientific misconduct, threatening to sue an organization that

is bringing her to speak, and using a few sentences from my article to try and
censure her publicly. An astounding recent posting on the Internet gives a feel
for the vitriol behind this. It came from a self-proclaimed "insider" at the Uni
versity of Maryland who claimed he had copies of 11 confidential letters within
the American Psychological Association, alerted readers to two current ethics co
mplaints against Loftus, and blasted a rallying call. "If you or anyone you know
has been on the wrong end of Loftus' testimony, you or your friend should pin t
heir courage to the sticking place and file an ethics complaint against Loftus.
. . . This window of opportunity won't last forever. . . . Let's go gang!"
Here's what happened: On January 16, Loftus resigned from the APA, noting that i
t had moved "disturbingly far from scientific thinking." Her resignation came af
ter completing a report for a special task force on recovered memory. Its six ps
ychologists had become so polarized--along exactly the same fault lines as the c
ulture at large--that they produced two separate reports.
By a most bizarre coincidence, two women at opposite ends of the country filed f
ormal complaints against Loftus within weeks of each other, just before she resi
gned. Both had won civil suits after recovering long-buried memories of sexual a
buse. Jennifer Hoult, a harpist in New York, said she sent a 30-page complaint w
ith 100 pages of backup to the APA on November 20. Lynn Crook, of Washington sta
te, filed on December 8. Both claimed Loftus had publicly misrepresented their c
ases. Rumors flew that the two Women had been in cahoots, and were egged on by a
network of incest survivors and pyschotherapists. Meanwhile, rumors flew that L
oftus had been tipped off and resigned before the APA could investigate the comp
laints, leaving them moot. An article in the Toronto Star suggested just that.
But the complaints, when studied, are baseless. Nobody would resign over them. W
hat they seem to poignantly reveal is the sound and fury of women so enmeshed in
pain and anger that, though both claim to have wonderful lives, they cannot tur
n swords into plowshares and walk away from a battle that gave their lives treme
ndous, if tormented, meaning.
Lynn Crook filed her complaint about three sentences in my January/ February 199
5 article on memory. She actually referred to my stated opinion as Loftus' "clai
m". She also cited a brief summary Loftus made of an anonymous case. Crook recog
nized herself in one detail: In her testimony, she stated that her father "made
me put my fist into the horse." Loftus' "misrepresentation" reads "Daddy made me
stick my fist up the anus of a horse."
Why, nearly a year later, would Crook take a few dozen words about an anonymous
case in a long article on memory and draw attention to it? Especially since that
case was dissected in a 1994 book, Making Monsters, by Pulitzer prizewinner Ric
hard Ofshe, Ph.D., and Ethan Watters. The book states: "The defense even called
in a veterinarian to tell the court what a horse's reaction might be if one were
to stand directly behind the animal and force an arm into its large intestines.
"
I asked Crook why she never complained about Ofshe. "Because he's not a member o
f the APA." (He is.) And "Because he's a tenured professor." (So is Loftus). Cro
ok, along with Hoult, has requested that Loftus' APA resignation be rescinded an
d a formal investigation begun. Crook insists that in filing her complaint, she
wasn't influenced by Hoult, even though they are friendly. Recently, Hoult calle
d Southwestern Psychological Association officers about a possible lawsuit if th
ey allowed Loftus to discuss her case at an April conference.
Why Loftus? And why now? The tide has turned. Many recovered memory convictions
have been overturned. Much of this is due to Loftus: it would help if she could
be discredited as an expert witness. But far more powerful a reason is that Loft
us is a woman, a scientist, unshakable, and widely liked; she's broken too many

taboos. Women are supposed to burn bras, weep, and yell, not marshall strong sci
ence in powerfully argued debates. And no woman is supposed to turn traitor to t
he cause--the misguided feminist cause of other women as victims.
Columnist Ellen Goodman once wrote, "You don't have to check your skepticism at
the door of feminism any more than you have to check your bra." Loftus has every
right to engage in this debate, as do Hoult and Crook. All sides need to be hea
rd. That's what academic freedom, journalism, and supposedly feminism are all ab
out, aren't they?
_
Look up a phone number and most of us can remember it long enough to dial.But ta
ck on an unfamiliar area code and we're in trouble. Seven chunks of info is abou
t all our memory can handle at one time.
Why is our short-term memory so feeble? The answer lies
archers at Brandeis University believe. They've devised
ansform how we think of short-term memory. Forget those
t-term memory may operate more like a mental time-share

in our brain waves, rese

a new theory that may tr
computer metaphors--shor
system.

While long-term memories are based on the patterns of connections between neuron
s, the cells that keep track of short-term memories do so by electrical signals.
As long as they're retaining a memory, the cells fire in cycles, or oscillation
s, that last between 20 and 40 milliseconds, says biologist John Lisman, Ph.D.
This is where the time-sharing comes in. Our brains also produce longer electric
al signals--alpha and theta waves--that last about 200 milliseconds. Divide thos
e long waves into slots, and you can fit about seven of the 20-to-40-millisecond
cycles.
If Lisman and physicist Marco Idiart, Ph.D., are right, each memory takes its pl
ace in a designated slot of the longer brain waves. Computer simulations confirm
that a neural network operating under these conditions can, with appropriate in
put and feedback, store about seven memories.
This new view, reported in Science, "addresses for the first time the function o
f brain oscillations in short-term memory," Lisman says. "We're pulling together
biophysical ideas, neural network ideas, and traditional psychology."
Indeed, it was a 30-year-old psych experiment that convinced Lisman and Idiart t
hey were on the right track. In a famous study, Saul Sternberg presented subject
s with a list of one to six digits (thereby introducing the numbers into short-t
erm memory) and then asked whether a particular digit was on the list. Subjects
took about four-tenths of a second to answer--plus an extra 38 milliseconds for
each item on the list.
That added delay, Lisman says, tells us how long it takes to scan through each s
hort-term memory--and it corresponds to the 20 to 40 millisecond storage cycles.
]
Schizophrenics often speak in a rambling, incoherent fashion, a symptom once con
sidered evidence of demonic possession. Now researchers are investigating a less
supernatural explanation. The problem, they say, may reflect a deficit in short
-term memory.
Short-term, or working, memory is where we store the local pizzeria's telephone
number between the time we look it up and the time we dial the phone. Most of us
can store about seven bits of information for up to a minute before it slips aw
ay.

But recent studies have shown that the prefrontal cortex, where working memory r
esides, is significantly less active in schizophrenics. Since their memory circu
itry is partially out of order, they may be unable to recall what they were thin
king a moment earlier.
"If they cannot keep the subject of a sentence in mind by the time they get to t
he verb or object, it's going to be fragmented and incoherent," says Yale neuros
cientist Patricia Goldman-Rakic, Ph.D.
The short-term memory theory might explain why drugs that reduce a schizophrenic
's hallucinations do little to make his thoughts more coherent. Most of the drug
s block a specific receptor--called D2--to the neurotransmitter dopamine. But th
e prefrontal cortex is richer in D1 molecules, which the drugs ignore.
Monkey studies show that a drug that blocks D1 receptors makes prefrontal cells
more active. Goldman-Rakic hopes that such a drug might one day help schizophren
ics.
}
Struggling to recall a phone number or the name of an old acquaintance can be an
incredibly frustrating feeling. "I don't know. I just can't think right now," w
e often sigh.
But University of California psychiatrist Larry Squire begs to differ with you.
At such times, he finds, thinking areas of your brain are likely to be working h
arder than when a memory comes with ease.
For some time now, scientists have suspected that the hippocampus (a small area
near the brain's center) is the command post for creating and recalling memories
of people, places, and things--so called declarative memory. Now, Squire and a
team in San Diego have found that when you engage in active memory searches, the
hippocampus also enlists the frontal cortex to track down distant recollections
.
What makes their work so, well, memorable is that it is the first to glimpse mem
ory in action in the minds of normal folks. Using PET (positron emission tomogra
phy) scans to take snapshots of brain activity by measuring blood flow, the team
tracked a variety of memory tasks in 18 healthy adults. Earlier work relied on
matching brain-activity patterns with functional problems in brain-damaged perso
ns.
"The results provide clear evidence in humans of selective activation of the hip
pocampal region in association with memory function," the team reports in the Pr
oceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Squire's study is memorable for another important reason: The pictures contradic
t the long-held belief that language is processed on the left side of the brain.
When he jogged people's memories by showing them word fragments and asking them
to recall a whole word, the hippocampal region on the right side lit up more th
an it did on the left side. That suggests the subjects used visual images of wor
ds to trigger their memory.
The new application of imaging devices promises to open the floodgates of human
memory research. Picture this occurring sometime in the near future--perhaps the
y'll be used to evaluate our educational efforts.
}
For most of his 20s, Ed Cooke had been hovering around the top 10 of the World M

emory Championships. His achievements included memorising

30 minutes and the order of 16 packs of playing cards in
he age of 26, he was getting restless, and wanted to help
im. "The memory techniques take a certain discipline," he
that would just allow you to relax into learning."

2,265 binary digits in

just an hour. But at t
others to learn like h
says. "I wanted a tool

The resulting brainchild was Memrise. Launched in 2010, the website and app is n
ow helping more than 1.4 million users to learn foreign languages, history and s
cience with the ease of Cooke's memory powers. It has been followed by similar a
pps that also take the pain out of learning
both for individuals, and in schools
, with some teachers finding benefits that even Cooke couldn't have predicted.
It's very powerful
it does all the spade work of learning, says Dominic Traynor, w
ho teaches Spanish at the St Cuthbert with St Matthias Primary School in London,
UK. I would say we've covered a year's worth of work in the first six months.
As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at
Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his trie
d-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they
came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise s progress over the fo
llowing years. The first is the idea of elaborative learning in which you try to g
ive extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These mems , as
the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as
well as the synapses and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encour
aged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind
. For example, in one German language course, the word abend for evening, is illus
trated with a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster, with the
caption Abe ends work in the evening . It s silly, but that s the point
an absurd imag
e is memorable.
To cultivate those memories, the app then sets you a series of carefully timed t
ests over the days, weeks and months that follow. Numerous experiments over the
past few years have shown that the best way to build new neural pathways is to t
ry and recall it afresh, helping subjects remember more than twice as much, over
the long term, than just passively reading the material; self-testing also turn
s out to be more effective than creative techniques like drawing diagrams and mi
nd maps.
Although you can find other apps designed for rote learning and drilling in this
way, Memrise makes use of another trick. Detre had found that the most effectiv
e time to reactivate a memory is when you feel that it is half-remembered, halfforgotten when you feel it s on the tip of your tongue but you can't quite reach it.
So the Memrise team have designed an algorithm that predicts the arrival of tha
t agonising state, and then springs a test on you. Since the app constantly trac
ks your progress, over time it becomes more accurate at predicting your learning
curve, helping you surf the waves of your memory to more efficient learning.
Fun learning
All of which may help take the pain out of learning; however, the big challenge
was to make it fun too. We're always having to compete for your attention when yo
u look at the screen of your phone, says Ben Whately, Memrise's chief operating o
fficer. The experience has to have as much light-hearted interest as something li
ke Pinterest. But the team have also tried hard to create a community of learners
that encourages friendly competition
so users can upload their courses to share
with other people looking to learn the same subject, and they can compare their
rank on a leader board. We needed people to be comfortable to share stuff on sit
es like Facebook in order for it to get up and running on such a big scale, says
Whately.

Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attent
ion of Traynor's primary school pupils learning Spanish. As soon as they come int
o the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board, he says. An
d there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into
two while half are doing the spade work on vocabulary learning on the school's iP
ads, he can teach the others before the two halves switch over. By working with
these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child's
understanding of the grammar.
Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and
upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app
which they can then share
with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to h
ave spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. They're constantly trying to work
out whose voice they're hearing, he says. So they're giving more attention to the
different sounds. I think it's improved their speaking and listening dramaticall
y.
Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other
subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Bir
ch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach t
he advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school s Engli
sh department are using it to drill spelling. "The benefits for literacy can't b
e overstated," Birch says.
The Memrise team are now hoping to develop further features that might help teac
hers like Birch and Traynor by providing them with data on students progress, so
they can see which bits of the course are failing to stick. And following Memris
e s success, other companies seem to be seeing the potential of applying the art a
nd science of memory to learning apps. For instance, the Cerego app, which launc
hed in September 2013, also times your learning and testing to boost recall, and
its team have so far launched courses on brain anatomy, music theory and art hi
story. The team s preliminary tests on school students suggests that classes perfo
rm between 20-50% better using the app, and they are actively working with teach
ers and educational institutions to develop courses together.
So are we coming close to the relaxed, effortless learning that Cooke first envi
saged? Traynor thinks so; many of his class are so hooked that they readily prac
tice Spanish on their iPads at home, to the point that he now has to plan four o
r five lessons in advance. That's the strength of it, he says. The learning just do
esn't stop.
]
One day, Sebastian Thrun ran a simple and surprising experiment on a class of st
udents that changed his ideas about how they were learning.
The students were doing an online course provided by Udacity, an educational org
anisation that Thrun co-founded in 2011. Thrun and his colleagues split the onli
ne students into two groups. One group saw the lesson s presentation slides in col
our, and another got the same material in black and white. Thrun and Udacity the
n monitored their performance. The outcome? Test results were much better for the
black-and-white version, Thrun told Technology Review. That surprised me.
Why was a black-and-white lesson better than colour? It s not clear. But what matt
ers is that the data was unequivocal and crucially it challenged conventional as
sumptions about teaching, providing the possibility that lessons can be tweaked
and improved for students.
It was an early example of a trend promising to transform online education
the e
xploitation of huge amounts of data about how people actually learn. Artificial
intelligence underpinning online courses can log every click and keyboard stroke
a student makes, and this is revealing patterns of learning behaviour that are

difficult, if not impossible, for teachers to see in a traditional classroom. Eq

uipped with this information, course designers can adapt their materials, and de
liver the ultimate in targeted teaching. Could this lead to the perfect, persona
lised lesson?
This wealth of data is only available thanks to the recent rise in popularity of
Moocs (massive open online courses), which offer anyone with access to the inte
rnet the chance to sign up for university courses and study them for free. These
online courses, hosted by the likes of Udacity, Coursera and edX, have been the
subject of much hype in recent months, as institutions debate whether this will
save or endanger the traditional university degree. But arguably the real novel
ty they offer has been missed. Many critics dismiss Moocs as simply online video
s of lectures, and so nothing new. Yet Moocs greatest impact may come from what
they can teach the teachers: offering a unique opportunity to monitor student be
haviour during lessons in unprecedented detail.
You can even monitor mouse clicks. We collect tracking data such as whether they
press pause or play at certain parts of a video, says Chuong Do, a software engin
eer and leader of the data analytics team at Coursera.
For starters, such data helps Coursera group participants into different types o
f student, such as those who watch all the lectures and complete all the assignm
ents, others who lose interest over time, and those that like to watch the video
s but have no interest in completing any homework. Perhaps surprisingly, Courser
a has discovered there is also a group of students who complete all of the homew
ork assignments without watching any of the lectures. This was unexpected, but ma
ybe there are people who are really interested in earning a Coursera certificate
, or who have read the material already and are just using it as a way of brushi
ng up.
Such information will allow people to adapt courses for different sub-groups of
students. In particular, it provides clear and sometimes surprising signals abou
t the presentation style that works best for students, as Udacity s trial with bla
ck-and-white slides revealed.
Motivation exercise
According to Rene Kizilcec, a PhD student at the Lytics Lab at Stanford Universi
ty, the style of presentation on a computer screen can make a big difference to
learning. For example, the lecture videos that make up the bulk of teaching in M
oocs often contain an inset of the instructor in one corner of the slides. Kizil
cec wondered whether these inset videos, which are expensive to produce, actuall
y help students to learn, or are simply a distraction.
Kizilcec looked at whether the video of the instructor should be placed in the c
orner of every slide, or if it students would be equally happy if it disappeared
and reappeared intermittently. By monitoring over 21,000 participants on a Cour
sera course over a ten-week period, he found that students fell into two camps.
Those participants who had previously expressed a preference for learning visual
ly with an emphasis on text and graphics
experienced less mental effort and were
less likely to drop out of the course when the instructor s face appeared intermi
ttently. But those students who preferred to be taught verbally were much better
off with the instructor s face permanently in one corner of the screen. What this
result suggests is a need for adaptive systems, says Kizilcec.
Mooc data is also revealing how to best motivate students online. Joseph Jay Wil
liams and other researchers at Stanford University, alongside Jascha Sohl-Dickst
ein at non-profit online education provider Khan Academy, added messages above m
athematics problems on the KhanAcademy.org website to keep students motivated wh
ile undertaking assignments. They found that positive messages such as "this mig

ht be a tough problem, but we know you can do it," had little effect on student
performance. But when they added notes emphasising that intelligence can be impr
oved with effort, such as "remember, the more you practice the smarter you becom
e," they found that students attempted a greater number of problems and were mor
e likely to get them right.
A similar attempt by Coursera to encourage students to finish their course by re
minding them of what homework assignments they had yet to complete, actually led
to a drop in student retention when participants felt harassed, says Do. But th
e company got a much better response when they slipped in information within an em
ail that focused more on the positive achievements students had made that week,
with a chart showing what percentage of assignments they had completed and how m
any lectures they had watched.
If this trend continues, then, students could soon be receiving the ultimate in
personalised teaching, with unique lessons targeted exactly to their needs, moti
vations and learning style. The education technology start-up Knewton, for examp
le, has developed an adaptive learning system that instantaneously alters the wa
y it presents information to students based on what it gleans about their indivi
dual learning style as they interact with it. It s also possible that student beha
viour and progress could be monitored in even more detail than today. For exampl
e, some researchers are working on using facial recognition to identify
via webc
am whether students are following the lesson or frowning in confusion.
All of which promises a future in which teachers can adapt at a glance to how di
fferent students respond to everything from string theory to Shakespeare
whether
they are in a classroom or not. How students may feel about this level of monit
oring, however, is less clear.
}
What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?
It might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that smells
and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and creativity. Indeed,
some head teachers have recently taken to broadcasting noises and pumping whiffs
into their schools to see whether it can boost grades. Is there anything in it?
And if so, what are the implications for the way we all work and study?
There is certainly some well-established research to suggest that some noises ca
n have a detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15 years
have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of large airp
orts lag behind in their exam results.
But general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor of ac
oustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at the Institut
e of Education, have been conducting studies and advising politicians on the eff
ects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and sirens, as well as noise genera
ted by the children themselves. When they recreated those particular sounds in a
n experimental setting whilst children completed various cognitive tasks, they f
ound a significant negative effect on exam scores. Everything points to a detrime
ntal impact of the noise on children s performance, in numeracy, in literacy, and
in spelling, says Shield. The noise seemed to have an especially detrimental effe
ct on children with special needs. `
Shield says the sound of babble
the chatter of other children, is particularly dis
tracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan classrooms in schoo
ls would do well to take this on board. People are very distracted by speech
part
icularly if it s understandable, but you re not involved in it. This phenomenon is al
so known as the irrelevant speech effect, she says, adding that it s a very common
finding in open-plan offices as well.

Whether background sounds are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of
noise it is
and the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi Meh
ta from the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people s creativ
ity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises such as coffee-sh
op chatter and construction-site drilling
at different volumes. They found that
people were more creative when the background noises were played at a medium lev
el than when volume was low. Loud background noise, however, damaged their creat
ivity.
This makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham, at C
ardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of sounds on le
arning but was not involved in the study. Firstly, he says, sounds that are mos
t distracting tend to be very variable. A general hum in the background suggest
s a steady-state sound with not much acoustical variation. So there s not much ther
e to capture your attention nothing distracting the subjects, he says. At the sam
e time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be in a slightly height
ened state of arousal, says Perham. You don t want too much or too little arousal.
Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it might be that a general hum i
n the background gives an optimum level of arousal. With that in mind, Perham sug
gests there may be some benefit to playing music or other sounds in an art class
or other situations where creativity is key.
Many teachers all over the world already play music to students in class. Many a
re inspired by the belief that hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks, t
he so-called Mozart effect. While the evidence actually suggests it s a stretch to
say classical music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant sounds bef
ore a task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well, says Perham,
who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears to be that you e
njoy what you re hearing. If you like the music or you like the sound even listenin
g to a Stephen King novel
then you did better. It didn t matter about the music, he
says.
However, it s worth considering that music is not always helpful while you re trying
to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall for instance, do
ing mental arithmetic will be impaired by sounds with acoustic variation, which
includes most types of music, says Perham. (Except a few, like extreme death met
al.) Songs with lyrics, on the other hand, are more likely to interfere with tas
ks that involve semantics
such as reading comprehension. The task and the sound a
re important, when you have both of them using the same process then you get pro
blems, he says.
So, it seems that schools that choose to screen out disturbing noises and create
positive soundscapes could enhance the learning of their students, so long as t
hey make careful choices.
This isn t the only sense being tweaked to affect learning. Special educational ne
eds students at Sydenham high school in London are being encouraged to revise di
fferent subjects in the presence of different smells grapefruit scents for maths
, lavender for French and spearmint for history.
Less research has gone into the idea of whether scents can help with cognitive p
erformance, although there have been intriguing findings. In 2003, psychologist
Mark Moss, at Northumbria University, carried out a range of cognitive tests on
subjects who were exposed either to lavender or rosemary aromas. Rosemary in part
icular caught my attention as it is considered to be arousing and linked to memo
ry, he says, whereas lavender is considered to be sedating. Moss found that those
who were smelling lavender performed significantly worse in working memory test
s, and had impaired reaction times for both memory and attention-based tasks, co
mpared to controls. Those in the rosemary group, on the other hand, did much bet
ter than controls overall in the memory tasks, although their reaction times wer

e slower.
Why might this be? It s perhaps not surprising that smells affect memory, given th
at the brain s olfactory bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which deals
with learning. But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the pharmaco
logical effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from volunteers w
ho had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room, and found that
they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in their blood. Previ
ous research has shown that this compound increases communication between brain
cells, which might explain how it improves brain function.
So, as you finish reading this story, take a moment to tune into your senses. Cl
ose your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths. What can you hear and smell? The
answer, it seems, may affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes.
}