3.141592653589793238462643383279502884197169399375105820974944592307816406286208998628034825342117067982148086513282306647093844609550582231725359408128481117450284102701938521105559644622948954930381964428810975665933446128475648233786783165271201909145648566923460348610454326648213393607260249141273724587006606315588…You can tell from the first three or four digits that this whole bunch of numbers represents a simple idea, the ratio of a circle to its diameter, π. Now, if I say that the person who can memorize the most number of the decimals of pi can win a million dollar prize, what strategy do you think is the most effective, and how many decimals do you think are enough to win the prize?
One strategy that may come to your mind is creating little chunks of decimals of pi and memorize chunk by chunk. For example, the first 20 digits can be chunked into ‘31415,’ ‘92653,’ ‘58979,’ and‘32384.’ The last one or two digits of the previous chunk may cue you about the first one or two digits of the latter group. However, after you memorize a considerable number of decimals, you will find it difficult to continue because the digits cues start to repeat and you will experience too much retroactive interference, which describes the phenomenon that things memorized later may negatively affect your ability to recall something memorized earlier. A similar thing happens when you are trying to remember two people’s phone number. After you memorize the second phone number, the first one will appear to be a bit vague in your memory. You can choose to enlarge the group size from 5 digits to 10 digits to reduce the cue repetition, thus the retroactive interference can be reduced as you are using more digits as cues. However, you may still find it hard to continue after you reach a certain part when all the digits and cues entangle and you cannot recall them in a correct sequence, which is the key of memorizing pi. Due to the difficulties you find, you may come up with a reasonable estimation and wisely give up because it is kind of a waste of time. Read more…
Ever notice the diagrams in your textbook? Or the visuals in your professor’s slides? Or maybe the pictures in an instruction manual to construct furniture? It seems that professionals have caught onto the idea that pictures are beneficial to learning and understanding content. Whether is comes to providing information in a presentation, deciding how to best visualize data for a report, or giving directions for a task, it obvious that visual content provides some benefit in absorbing information that is not attainable through simple text. I am going to walk your through when visuals are most helpful, when they aren’t, and how to best include visuals in your own work. Read more…
The stereotypes of the “nerd” and the “dumb jock” are some of the most pervasive in the media. The nerd is so un-athletic he might hurt himself walking to class, and the jock spends more time in the gym than in the library. While these stereotypes may be well known, the importance of exercise and health has increased over the last decade. Not only does exercise improve short-term mental concentration and mood by the release of endorphins, it is also being studied for long-term benefits. Even mainstream media has commented on exercise benefits, for example in the movie legally blonde displayed in figure 1.
Figure 1. Quote from Legally Blonde (2001) movie
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.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
It’s a given that as college students, we all feel tired from time to time. Well, maybe more than from time to time. Walking across campus, have you ever heard people saying things like “I got two hours of sleep last night,” “I slept terribly last night,” “I’m going to pass out right now,” or something along those lines? I’m sure you have at some point. 
We have all heard that it’s important to get our sleep. This is partly because there has been a lot of research showing that our episodic memory, or memory for specific details and events, is better after a period of sleep. For example, if you were to go out on the town and attend a show, your memory for the details and events of that show would be better the next day if you got eight hours of sleep, as opposed to staying out in the city all night. One reason for this phenomenon is that a function of sleep is consolidation (Diekelmann & Born, 2010), or the neural process by which memories are strengthened and more permanently stored. The more sleep you get, the more consolidation occurs, and the better your memories become.
Read more…
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.
Read more…
Has a smell ever made you remember a specific event or time in your life?
A lot of people tend to equate the smell of fresh baked cookies with their childhood. For me, the smell of a burning woodstove transports me to snowy days growing up in Vermont. Odors have the exceptional ability to instantaneously trigger vivid autobiographical memories—a phenomenon referred to as the Proust effect.
While other stimuli can also (obviously) make us recall past memories, they are usually not as detailed, sudden, or vivid as those related to smells. Certain smells can suddenly and involuntarily transport us to a specific time and place. What makes smells so special? Why wouldn’t looking at a picture of your childhood home have the same effect as smelling its scent?
Read more…
We’ve all been there before: It’s the end of the first semester at Colby College, your work is piling up, the temperature is plummeting amidst strong unrelenting and merciless winds, and sunshine is beginning to slip away at the premature hour of 4 pm. You just feel, well, bad. You are experiencing all of this negative emotion during this stressful time, and you can’t seem to shake it! Well, better get yourself a Happy Light to shoo away that Seasonal Affective Disorder because if you want your memory to be in tip-top shape so you can conquer your final exams, you may need to turn that frown upside down.
Previous research has suggested that memories of events that are infused with high levels of emotion can facilitate an individual’s ability to recall those memories (Brown & Kulik, 1977). Emotional events that occur in our everyday lives are usually remembered well, whereas neutral events do not reside as vividly in our memory. This phenomenon is evident in the existence of flashbulb memories, which are vivid and poignant memories of specific events that are assessed in the moment of the event, but are retained in long-term memory. For instance, you might have a visual snapshot of the time you labored for long hours to concoct a birthday cake for your Great Aunt Patricia, and then tripped over a small beetle, causing the cake to hurdle to its death on the unforgiving kitchen floor! Surely you are never going to forget that incident. (Even though you may desperately want to).
Read more…
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?
Read more…
Recent Comments