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I was listening to a podcast the other day. Two psychologists (Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Galonka) were being interviewed about embodied cognition, a topic I find particularly interesting.

This post is the third part in a four-part series on how education delivery is changing, and the set of literacies required in today’s world. Part 1 looked at the changing world of textbooks; Part 2 looked at direct instruction/lecturing. This post looks at computer learning.

There have been quite a few studies looking into the possible benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and fish (a good source of the oils), particularly for older adults. Several large studies have found that regular intake of oily fish is associated with lower rates of dementia, and some evidence that eating fish regularly slows the rate of 'normal' age-related cognitive decline.

We forget someone’s name, and our response might be: “Oh I’ve always been terrible at remembering names!” Or: “I’m getting old; I really can’t remember things anymore.” Or: nothing — we shrug it off without thought. What our response might be depends on our age and our personality, but that response has nothing to do with the reason we forgot.

"I'm terrible at remembering names"

"I'm great with names, but I'm hopeless at remembering what I've read."

"I always remember what people tell me about themselves, but I'm always forgetting birthdays and anniversaries."

There is no such thing as a poor memory!

There will be memory domains that you are less skilled at dealing with.

Information comes in different packages

Think about the different types of information you have stored in your memory:

We all know that lack of sleep makes us more prone to attentional failures, more likely to make mistakes, makes new information harder to learn, old information harder to retrieve ... We all know that, right? And yet, so many of us still go to bed too late to get the sleep we need to function well. Of course, some of us go to sleep early enough, we just can’t get to sleep fast enough, or are prone to waking in the night. (Personally, I can count the times I’ve slept through the night without waking in the last fifteen years on my fingers).

Let's look a little deeper into the value of mnemonics for knowledge acquisition. By “knowledge acquisition”, I mean the sort of information you learn from textbooks — information that is not personal, that you need for the long-term.

In this context, I believe the chief value of mnemonic strategies is to help you recall information that needs to be remembered in a particular order. Thus we use mnemonics to help us remember the order of the planets, the order of musical notes on the stave, the order of the colors in a rainbow.

You may have heard of “g”. It’s the closest we’ve come to that elusive attribute known as “intelligence”, but it is in fact a psychometric construct, that is, we surmise its presence from the way in which scores on various cognitive tests positively correlate.

In other words, we don’t really know what it is (hence the fact it is called “g”, rather than something more intelligible), and in fact, it is wrong to think of it as a thing. What it is, is a manifestation of some property or properties of the brain — and we don’t know what these are.

Research with children has demonstrated that the ability to learn new words is greatly affected by working memory span - specifically, by how much information they can hold in that part of working memory called "phonological short-term memory". The constraining effect of working memory capacity on the ability to learn new words appears to continue into adolescence.

Alzheimer's disease currently affects one in 10 people over age 65 and nearly half of those over age 85.

More than 19 million Americans say they have a family member with the disease, and 37 million say they know somebody affected with Alzheimer's.

In the United States, the average lifetime cost per Alzheimer patient is US$174,000. (These figures are from the U.S. Alzheimer's Association).