Going in to the 2012 Olympics, gymnast McKayla Maroney was considered to be the best vaulter in the world. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that McKayla would win the Olympic gold medal. After contributing a nearly perfect vault to help her team win the gold medal, she was ready to do it again for event finals. She did her first vault and took a hop that would likely cost her 3/10 of a
point. Nothing major, but she knew that she could do better. When she went back to the end of the runway and prepared for her second vault, all McKayla wanted to do was to stick the landing like she had done so many times in practice. She wanted it so badly that she overthought what should have been automatic, she did not rotate enough, and she ended up landing on her butt, causing a full point to be deducted. McKayla choked, costing her the Olympic gold medal.
Mental toughness is a key aspect in all sports. Every athlete knows that no matter how strong you are, how skilled you are, or how much time you have put into practice, when you are in a pressure situation, it all comes down to how mentally tough you are. It is one of the most frustrating things as an athlete to mess up on a skill that you can normally do in your sleep, especially when that one mistake costs you the game or competition. Read more…
I guess I jumped the gun and gave the answer away in my title, but… does the loss of memory due to diseases like Alzheimer’s affect memory for music?
Typically in research fields, losing something allows us to understand how that something works. In this case, losing memory as a result of Alzheimer’s disease provides information on what is cognitively impaired as well as what is not impaired. So does losing your memory due to dementia impair memory for music? If evidence points to the answer no, perhaps there exists a unique memory system solely for music; but if evidence points to the answer yes, perhaps there still exists a unique memory system for music. That’s pretty confusing. I’ll make a valiant effort to explain what I mean by analyzing a psychological study. Kerer et al. (2013) seek to answer this main research question by examining explicit memory for music in individuals with and without cognitive impairment, including those with Alzheimer’s disease.
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Did somebody ever tell you not to be afraid of pressure because after all pressure is what turns coal into a diamond? This saying encourages us to embrace new challenges and to see pressure as a possibility to grow. In other words, if we manage stress well, we can transform ourselves from a lump of coal into a precious diamond. Accordingly, having a certain amount of pressure in our lives can help us to excel. However, if the pressure becomes too much, we freeze and are overwhelmed by a task.
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Do you listen to music while you do assigned homework? Do you listen to music while you study? Do you listen to music while you are reading for class? If you are a college student I would assume that you said yes to at least one of these questions. As college student, when I am in the library or any public study space I often see the majority of my peers with headphones in while doing their work. Whether or not they are all just trying to avoid talking to me, I will never know, but I usually assume that there is some sort of sound or music coming from the headphones. Often people’s reasoning for doing this is because they want to “tune out” all of the distractions and conversations happening around them. Furthermore, if they are “tuning out” all of the distracting sounds around them then they think they are successfully staying focused and internalizing whatever material they are working on.
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Do you worry about what will happen to your body as you get older? Do you envision your brain slowing down and your grandkids speaking realllyy slllowwlyyy so you can understand them?
Cognitive functioning—which includes attention (allotting mental resources to notice something), memory (the process of encoding, storing, and retrieving information), and executive functioning (a broad term for the system that regulates many cognitive processes)—tends to decrease with age. However, one of the many benefits of exercise is that it has been shown to improve cognitive functioning. And for many older adults, general fitness as it relates to health is a primary concern. But some forms of exercise can be harmful or painful for older adults who have joint pain. So what kind of exercise and how much exercise should older adults get in order to stay physically and mentally healthy?
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For many college students in the United States, spending ti
me on Facebook is a daily routine, whether it is to chat with friends, look at interesting posts, or cyber-stalk your recent crush. Facebook and other forms of social media have become a big parts of contemporary life whether people like it or not. And in current times when professors are Facebook friends, online dating is becoming more prevalent, and employers look up profiles to make an impression of potential employees, it is important to mind the content and know what it is that people pay attention to. The current study, Seidman and Miller (2013), uses an eye-tracking software to find out just that. Read more…
Many people sacrifice sleep in order to finish that last little bit of work, but it turns out that you may be better off just going to sleep. Few people realize the harmful effects of developing a habit of forgoing sleep. A recent study conducted by Bawden, Oliveira, and Caramelli (2011) reveals that continued sleep deprivation can have an adverse effect on an individual’s executive functioning, attention, and memory. Executive functioning is essentially an individual’s management system. It is responsible for directing attention, planning, and regulating mental representations (an individual’s mental image of reality). These functions are among the most important in carrying out daily life, and people that deprive their bodies of sufficient sleep may be cultivating a ticking time-bomb.
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You’re sitting in class trying to scratch down notes as your professor drones on and on. In the midst of the monotonous task, you begin to think of the busy day ahead of you. Lost in thought, you shift in your seat, and soon your notes have become little more than a few random words on a page, and you realize you’ve missed the last five minutes of the lecture.
We’ve all been there. We all find our minds wandering off from time-to-time, and we’ve all experienced that feeling where your leg starts shaking, fingers start tapping, and you just can’t seem to sit still and focus on the task at hand.
It makes sense that if your mind is elsewhere, your performance on the current task will be largely inhibited, but why is it that the deeper we fall into this trance, the less control we have over bodily movements too? What is the connection between this occurrence of motor and mental restlessness—that is, how do fidgeting and mind wandering relate?
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“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent…It is the one that is most adaptable to change. In the struggle for survival, the fittest win out at the expense of their rivals because they succeed in adapting themselves best to their environment.” Sound at all familiar to you? It might if you have ever heard of a man named Charles Darwin. (High-speed sixth-grade science class recap: Darwin was that brilliant, illustriousnaturalistaccredited with the theory of “survival of the fittest”—the natural selection tagline, if you will.) In 21st-century vernacular, one might say that he was “kind of a big deal.”
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Don’t you wish you had perfect attention skills? That you could become so immersed in your studying that even hearing your name wouldn’t pull you away from the task at hand? The level of focus which you have for the task at hand is regulated by the central executive portion of the brain, where working memory is. Working memory has been studied extensively, and one example of research that demonstrates good working memory is called the cocktail party effect. This refers to the phenomenon of being in a busy room, yet still hearing your name from somewhere in the crowd, even when you are having your own conversation. When looking at the cocktail party effect, it was found that people with stronger working memory are less likely to hear their name said while in a busy room with lots of people. (Conway et al., 2001). This makes sense, because strong working memory would indicate that you are so absolutely immersed and focused on the conversation or task at hand that outside stimuli, such as your name, will not distract you. Working memory is different than short-term memory because it is much more active; it helps with reading comprehension, and has specialized parts for holding onto different types of information. Working memory is predictive of performance various activities, whereas short-term memory does not predict many cognitive processes. What is in your working memory is what you are thinking about right here and right now. Read more…
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