Which American president inspired the creation of the blue jelly bean?
People routinely fail to learn from their mistakes — but why?
The conditions under which people tend to learn best.
Improve memory and learning using this simple habit.
Exercise promotes the growth of dendritic spines from neurons by acting on a critical gene.
Our brains crave information in the same way as food and money.
Scientists watched memories physically forming in the brain.
The method almost doubled people’s speed and accuracy.
The method almost doubled people’s speed and accuracy.
Making small changes to practice helps people learn skills twice as fast, recent research finds.
Small adjustments to practice work much better than practicing in the same way over-and-over again.
For example, those learning the piano can play slightly louder and softer or slightly faster and slower.
Those learning a sport can make small changes to equipment or rules to create variation.
Learning is enhanced by forcing the mind to adapt to changes.
Professor Pablo A. Celnik, study co-author, said:
“What we found is if you practice a slightly modified version of a task you want to master, you actually learn more and faster than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.”
For the study, 86 people learned to use a pinching movement to move a cursor across a computer screen.
Some simply practiced in exactly the same way again and again, while others had the task modified slightly.
The modification was that people needed to apply slightly different forces, so that they were constantly adapting.
Small modifications to practice almost doubled people’s speed and accuracy, the results revealed.
Professor Celnik said:
“Our results are important because little was known before about how reconsolidation works in relation to motor skill development.
This shows how simple manipulations during training can lead to more rapid and larger motor skill gains because of reconsolidation.
The goal is to develop novel behavioral interventions and training schedules that give people more improvement for the same amount of practice time.”
Other studies suggest only small tweaks to practice will work, Professor Celnik said:
“If you make the altered task too different, people do not get the gain we observed during reconsolidation.
The modification between sessions needs to be subtle.”
The study was published in the journal Current Biology (Wymbs et al., 2016).
Double your attention span by doing your learning here.
Double your attention span by doing your learning here.
Learning outside in a natural environment can double the attention span, new research finds.
The study of 9 and 10-year-olds found that when taught outside, they became more attentive and engaged.
Because of the ‘nature effect’, teachers were able to teach for twice as long as an indoor lesson.
Parks, trees and wildlife have been shown in many studies to increase the attention, motivation and physical activity of adults.
Studies have already shown that students demonstrate higher attention when they have a view of greenery from their classroom.
This study takes it to the next logical step.
Dr Ming Kuo, the study’s first author, said:
“We wanted to see if we could put the nature effect to work in a school setting.
If you took a bunch of squirmy third-graders outdoors for lessons, would they show a benefit of having a lesson in nature, or would they just be bouncing off the walls afterward?”
For the study, teachers held classes indoors and outdoors and compared the difference.
They counted the number of times they had to tell children to sit down and refocus on their work.
The results showed that children were more engaged during the outdoor session.
Outdoors, the teacher only had to redirect their attention half as many times.
The research also included a teacher who was skeptical about the benefits of teaching outdoors.
Dr Kuo said:
“Our teachers were able to teach uninterrupted for almost twice as long at a time after the outdoor lesson, and we saw the nature effect with our skeptical teacher as well.
We’re excited to discover a way to teach students and refresh their minds for the next lesson at the same time.
Teachers can have their cake and eat it too.”
The study was published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology (Kuo et al., 2018).
Two-thirds of Americans are deficient in this dietary metal, which boosts memory and learning.
Two-thirds of Americans are deficient in this dietary metal, which boosts memory and learning.
Magnesium supplements could improve both memory and learning, research finds.
The conclusions come from a study on rats that were given magnesium-L-threonate.
This enhanced many forms of memory and learning in comparison to a control group.
Only one-third of Americans are thought to get the recommended amount of magnesium in their diet.
Magnesium is found in:
Professor Guosong Liu, who led the study, said:
“”We found that increased brain magnesium enhanced many different forms of learning and memory in both young and aged rats.
[…]Magnesium is essential for the proper functioning of many tissues in the body, including the brain and, in an earlier study, we demonstrated that magnesium promoted synaptic plasticity in cultured brain cells.
Therefore it was tempting to take our studies a step further and investigate whether an increase in brain magnesium levels enhanced cognitive function in animals.”
Dr Liu and colleagues developed a new compound of magnesium to help boost the levels in the brain.
The magnesium-L-threonate was used in rats of different ages.
The researchers found it increased the number of working synapses (connections between brain cells).
It also increased processes that are vital to both long- and short-term memory in the brain.
“Our findings suggest that elevating brain magnesium content via increasing magnesium intake might be a useful new strategy to enhance cognitive abilities.
Moreover, half the population of industrialized countries has a magnesium deficit, which increases with aging.
This may very well contribute to age-dependent memory decline; increasing magnesium intake might prevent or reduce such decline.”
The magnesium supplement worked despite the rats already getting sufficient levels of magnesium in their diet.
In other words it was necessary to boost the magnesium levels higher than ‘normal’.
The study was published in the journal Neuron (Slutsky et al., 2010).
Magnesium image from Shutterstock
Join the free PsyBlog mailing list. No spam, ever.
