The three most important times for learning are: Before, During, and (soon) After.

Before

1. Bring your “A game.” Choose to be positive and interested. Being bored is a choice— a self-defeating choice.

2. Check your foundation. Come prepared.

3. Expect to remember.

During

4. Pay Attention. Ask questions.

5. Take good notes.

6. THINK!

(soon) After

7. Avoid mental interference. Use quiet, uninterrupted reflection during rehearsal.

8. Apply what you just learned

9. Self- test. Really test, don't just "look over." Repeat several times in the next hours and days.

"Memory Medic" is author of Memory Power 101and Better Grades, Less Effort. Both are available at Amazon.com.

In the previous post, Decision-making 101, I provided evidence that selective attention to items that were retrieved into working memory were a major factor in making good decisions. This has generally unrecognized educational significance. Rarely is instructional material packaged with foreknowledge of how it can be optimized in terms of reducing the working memory cognitive load. New research from a cognitive neuroscience group in the U.K. is demonstrating the particular importance this has for learning how to correctly categorize new learning material. They show that learning is more effective when the instruction is optimized ("idealized" in their terminology).

Decisions often require categorizing novel stimuli, such as normal/abnormal, friend/foe, helpful/harmful, right/wrong or even assignment to one of multiple category options. Teaching students how to make correct category assignments is typically based on showing them examples for each category. Categorization issues routinely arise when learning is tested. For example, the common multiple-choice testing in schools requires that a decision be made on each potential answer as right or wrong.

In reviewing the literature on optimizing training, these investigators found reports that one approach that works is to present training in a specific order. For example, in teaching students how to classify by category, people perform better when a number of examples from one category are presented together followed by a number of contrasting examples from the other category. Other ordering manipulations are learned better if simple, unambiguous cases in either category are presented together early in training, while the harder, more confusing cases are presented afterwards. Such training strengthens the contrast between the two categories.

The British group has focused on the role of working memory in learning. Their idea is that ambiguity during learning is a problem. In real-world situations that require correct category identification, naturally occurring ambiguities make correct decisions difficult. Think of these ambiguities as cognitive "noise" that interferes with the training that is recalled into working memory. This noise clutters the encoding during learning and clutters the thinking process and impairs the rigorous thought processes that may be needed to make a correct distinction. In the real world of youngsters in school, other major cognitive noise sources are the task-irrelevant stimuli that come from multi-tasking habits so common in today's students.

The theory is that when performing a learned task, the student recalls what has been taught into working memory. Working memory has very limited capacity, so any "noise" associated with the initial learning may be incompletely encoded and the remembered noise may also complicate the thinking required to perform correctly. Thus, simplifying learning material should reduce remembered ambiguities, lower the working memory load, and enable better reasoning and test performance.

One example of optimizing learning is the study by Hornsby and Love (2014) who applied the concept to training people with no prior medical training to decide whether a given mammogram was normal or cancerous. They hypothesized that learning would be more efficient if students were trained on mammograms that were easily identified as normal or cancerous, and did not include examples where the distinction was not so obvious. The underlying premise is that decision-making involves recalling past remembered examples into working memory and accumulating the evidence for the appropriate category.  If the remembered items are noisy (i.e. ambiguous) the noise also accumulates and makes the decision more difficult. Thus, learners will have more difficulty if they are trained on examples across the whole range of possibilities from clearly evident to obscure than if they were separately trained on examples that were clearly evident as belong into one category or another.

Initially a group of learners was trained on a full-range mixture of mammograms so the images could be classified by diagnostic difficulty as easy or hard or in between. On each trial, three mammograms were shown: the left image was normal, the right was cancerous, and the middle was the test item requiring a diagnosis of whether it was normal or cancerous.

In the actual experiment, one student group was trained to classify a representative set of easy, medium, and hard images, while the other group was trained only on easy samples. During training trials, learners looked at the three mammograms, stated their diagnosis for the middle image, and were then given feedback as to whether they were right or wrong. After completing all 324 training trials, participants completed 18 test trials, which consisted of three previously unseen easy, medium and hard items from each category displayed in a random order. Test trials followed the same procedure as training trials.

When both groups were tested on samples across the range in both conditions, the optimized group was better able to distinguish normal from cancerous mammograms in both the easy and medium images. Note that the optimized group was not trained on medium images. However, no advantage was found in the case of hard test items; both groups made many errors on the hard cases, and optimized training yielded poorer results than regular training. 

We need to explain why this strategy does not seem to work on hard cases. I suspect that in easy and medium cases, not much understanding is required. It is just a matter of pattern recognition, made easier because the training was more straightforward and less ambiguous. The learner is just making casual visual associations. For hard cases, a learner must know and understand the criteria needed to make distinctions. The subtle differences go unrealized if diagnostic criteria are not made explicit in the training. In actual medical practice, many mammograms actually cannot be distinguished by visual inspection—they really are hard. Other diagnostic tests are needed.

The basic premise of such research is that learning objects or task should be pared down to the basics, eliminating extraneous and ambiguous information, which constitute “noise” that confounds the ability to make correct categorizations.

In common learning situations, a major source of noise is extraneous information, such as marginally relevant detail. Reducing this noise is achieved by focus on the underlying principle. Actually I stumbled on this basic premise of simplification over 50 years ago when I was a student trying to optimize my own learning. What I realized was the importance of homing in on the basic principle of what I was trying to learn from instructional material. If I understood a principle, I could use that understanding to think through to many of the implications and applications.

In other words, the principle is: "don't memorize any more than you have to." Use the principles as a way to figure out what was not memorized. Once core principles are understood, much of the basic information can be deduced or easily learned. This is akin to the standard practice of moving from the general to the specific. Even so, general ideas should emphasize principles.

Textbooks are sometimes quite poor in this regard. Too many texts have so much ancillary information in them that they should be thought of as reference books. That is why I have found a good market for my college-level neuroscience electronic textbook, “Core Ideas in Neuroscience,” in which each 2-3 page chapter is based entirely on each of the 75 core principles that cover the broad span of membrane biochemistry to human cognition.. A typical neuroscience textbook by other authors can run up to 1,500 pages.

Source:

Hornsby, Adam, and Love, B. C. (2014). Improved classification of mammograms following idealized training. J. Appl. Res. Memory and Cognition. 3(2):72-76.

Dr. Klemm is a Senior Professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M. His latest books are Memory Power 101, (Skyhorse) and Mental Biology (Prometheus). He also writes learning and memory blogs for Psychology Today magazine and his own site at thankyoubrain.blogspot.com. His posts have nearly 1.5 million reader views.

Whether the music is orchestral, rock, country, or jazz, most seniors like to listen to some kind of music. Music can soothe or energize, make us happy or sad, but the kind we like to hear does something that can be positively reinforcing or otherwise we would not listen to it. As my 80-year-old jazz trumpeter friend, Richard Phelps, recently said at his birthday party, "Where there is life there is music. Where there is music, there is life."

Relatively little research has been done on the effects of music on brain function in older people. But one study recently reported the effects in older adults of background music on brain processing speed and two kinds of memory (episodic and semantic). The subjects were not musicians and had an average age of 69 years.

The music test conditions were: 1) no music control, 2) white noise control, 3) a Mozart recording, and 4) a Mahler recording. All 65 subjects were tested in counter-balanced order in all four categories. The music was played at modest volume as background before and during performance of the cognitive tasks, a mental processing speed task and the two memory tasks. The episodic memory task involved trying to recall a list of 15 words immediately after a two-minute study period. The semantic memory task involved word fluency in which subjects wrote as many words as they could think of beginning with three letters of the alphabet.

Processing speed performance was faster while listening to Mozart than with the Mahler or white noise conditions. No improvement in the Mahler condition was seen over white noise or no music.

Episodic memory performance was better when listening to either type of music thatn while hearing white noise or no music. No difference was noted between the two types of music.

Semantic memory was better for both kinds of music than with white noise and better with Mozart that with no music.

Recognizing that emotions could be a relevant factor, the experimenters analyzed a mood questionnaire comparing the two music conditions with white noise. Mozart generated higher happiness indicators than did Mahler or white noise. Mahler was rated more sad than Mozart and comparable to white noise.

Thus, happy, but not sad, music correlated with increased processing speed. The researchers speculated that happy subjects were more around and alert.

Surprisingly, both happy and sad music enhanced both kinds of memory over the white noise or silence condition. But it is not clear if this observation is generally applicable. The authors did mention without emphasis that the both kinds of music were instrumental and lacked loudness or lyrics that could have been distracting and thus impair memory. I think this point is substantial. When lyrics are present, the brain is dragged into trying to hear the words and thinking about their meaning. These thought processes would surely interfere with trying to memorize new information or recall previous learned material.

A point not considered at all is personal preference for a certain types of music. There are people who don't like classical music, and the data in this study could have been made "noisy" if enough of the 65 people disliked classical music and were actually distracted by it. In other words, the effects noted in this study might have been magnified if the subjects were allowed to hear their preferred music.

My take-home lesson was actually formed over five decades ago when I listed to jazz records while plowing my way through memorizing a veterinary medical curriculum. Then, I thought that the benefit was stress reduction (veterinary school IS stressful and happy jazz certainly reduces stress). Now perhaps I see that frequent listening to music that was pleasurable for me might have actually helped my memory capability. If you still have doubts you might want to check my latest blog post, "Happy thoughts can make you more competent" (http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com/2015/01/happy-thoughts-can-make-you-more.html).

Anyway, now that I am in the elderly category, I see there is still reason to listen to the music I like. Music can be therapy for old age.

“People haven't always been there for me but music always has.”

    —Taylor Swift

"Memory Medic's" latest book is "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine." It is available in inexpensive e-book form at Amazon or in all formats at Smashwords.com.

Source:

Bottiroli, Sara et al. (2014). The cognitive effects of listening to background music on older adults: processing speed improves with upbeat music, while memory seems to benefit from both upbeat and downbeat music. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience. Oct. 15. doi: 10.3389/fnagi.2014.00284.

Keep your "nose to the grindstone" is the advice we often tell young people is an essential ingredient of learning difficult tasks. A joke captures the matter with the old bromide for success, "Keep your eye on the ball, your ear to the ground, your nose to the grindstone, your shoulder to the wheel: Now try to work in that position."

Over the years of teaching, I have seen many highly conscientious students work like demons in their study yet don't seem to learn as much as they should for all the effort they put in. Typically, it is because they don't study smart.

In an earlier post, I described a learning strategy wherein a student should spend short (say 15-20 minutes) of intense study followed immediately by a comparable rest period of "brain-dead" activity where they don't engage with intense stimuli or a new learning task. The idea is that during brain down-time the memory of just-learned material is more likely to be consolidated into long-term memory because there are no mental distractions to erase the temporary working memory while it is in the process of consolidation.

Now, new research suggests that too much nose-to-the-grindstone can impair learning. Margaret Schlichting, a graduate student researcher, and Alison Preston, an associate professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of Texas tested the effect of mental rest with a learning task of remembering two sets of a series of associated photo pairs.  Between the two task sets, the participants rested and were allowed to think about whatever they wanted. Not surprisingly, those who used the rest time to reflect on what they had just learned were able to remember more upon re-test. Obviously, in this case, the brain is not really resting, as it is processing (that is, rehearsing) the new learning. But the brain is resting in the sense that new mental challenges are not encountered.

The university press release quotes the authors as saying, "We've shown for the first time that how the brain processes information during rest can improve future learning. We think replaying memories during rest makes those earlier memories stronger, not just impacting the original content, but impacting the memories to come." Despite the fact that this concept has been anointed as a new discovery in a prestigious science journal, the principle has been well-known for decades. I have explained this phenomenon in my memory books as the decades-old term of "interference theory of memory,"

What has not been well understood among teachers is the need to alter teaching practices to accommodate this principle. A typical class period involves teachers presenting a back-to-back succession of highly diverse learning objects and concepts. Each new topic interferes with memory formation of the prior topics. An additional interference occurs when a class period is disrupted by blaring announcements from the principal's office, designed to be loud to command attention (which has the effect of diverting attention away from the learning material). The typical classroom has a plethora of other distractions, such as windows for looking outside and multiple objects like animals, pictures, posters, banners, and ceiling mobiles designed to decorate and enliven the room. The room itself is a major distraction.

Then, to compound the problem, the class bell rings, and students rush out into the hall for their next class, socializing furiously in the limited time they have to get to the next class (on a different subject, by a different teacher, in a differently decorated classroom). You can be sure, little reflection occurs on the academic material they had just encountered.

The format of a typical school day is so well-entrenched that I doubt it can be changed. But there is no excuse for blaring loudspeaker announcements during the middle of a class period. Classrooms do not have to be decorated. A given class period does not have to be an information dump on overwhelmed students. Short periods of instruction need to be followed by short, low-key, periods of questioning, discussion, reflection, and application of what has just been taught. Content that doesn't get "covered" in class can be assigned as homework—or even exempted from being a learning requirement. It is better to learn a few things well than many things poorly. Indeed, this is the refreshing philosophy behind the new national science standards known as "Next Generation Science Standards."

Give our kids a rest: the right kind of mental rest.

Sources:

http://www.nextgenscience.org/

http://scicasts.com/neuroscience/2065-cognitive-science/8539-study-suggests-mental-rest-and-reflection-boost learning.

Schlicthing, M. L., and Preston, A. R. (2014). Memory reactivation during rest supports upcoming learning of related content. Proc. Nat. Acad. Science. Published ahead of print, Oct. 20.

Dr. Klemm's latest book, available at most retail outlets, is "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus). See reviews at http://thankyoubrain.com

Joe: My doctor told me to give up drinking, smoking, and fatty foods.

Sam: What will you do?

Joe: I think I’ll give up my doctor.

I try not to get too excited about memory benefits of supplements, because too often the claims are not substantiated by studies that are well controlled and peer reviewed. I now think resveratrol may be one of the few supplements that benefits brain function.

When I wrote my first blog on research on resveratrol benefits for brain function and memory, there were over 2,000 scientific papers.[1]Don't worry; I am only going to tell you about a few studies.

Resveratrol is an active ingredient in red wine. This compound has been credited for explaining why red-wine drinkers in France, who drink more wine than most people, are healthier than would be predicted by their lifestyle of little exercise and eating lots of cheese. The problem is most studies suggest you would have to drink a 100 or more glasses of red wine a day to get much resveratrol effect (and that effect would obviously be negated by a toxic dose of alcohol). An obviously more healthful choice is the highly concentrated pill forms of resveratrol that are now on the market.

Most of the protective biological actions associated with resveratrol have been associated with its scavenger properties for free radicals and the protective effects that it confers on the heart and diabetes. 

One important study comes from a diabetes research group in Brazil recently who reported a beneficial effect of resveratrol on diabetic rats.[2]Resveratrol (in a modest rat dose of 10 and 20 mg per kilogram per day for 30 days) prevented the impairment of memory induced by diabetes. Resveratrol may be protecting neuron terminals that diabetes can damage. An earlier study by another group showed resveratrol improved glucose metabolism and promoted longevity in diabetic mice.

Another benefit of resveratrol is the anti-oxidant property. The brain produces more free-radical damage than other organs, because it burns so much oxygen. Compared with other organs, the brain has especially low levels of antioxidant defense enzymes. 

One recent study has revealed resveratrol had protective effects against brain damage caused by a chemical that kills acetylcholine neurons. Injection of this toxin into the brain of rats impaired their memory performance in two kinds of maze tasks. The impairment was significantly reduced by repeated injection of resveratrol (10 and 20 mg/kg) per day for 25 days, beginning four days before the toxin injection.[3]

Another recent study examined effects on working memory in mice fed a resveratrol-supplemented diet for four weeks before being injected with a cytokine to induce inflammation and accelerate aging. Resveratrol significantly reduced memory impairment in the aged group, but not in the young adults[4]. The lack of benefit in young adults was a little misleading, in that there was a "ceiling effect" in that the young adults were not impaired by the cytokine injection.

 The practical issue for us is whether resveratrol will help cognitive function in humans, especially healthy humans. It seems likely because other substances that have strong anti-oxidant properties seem to improve memory capability. Because animal studies have shown promise for resveratrol in preventing or treatment several different conditions associated with aging, several human clinical trials have been initiated.[5]

 An impressive new study of older humans, male and female, has just been reported.[6]Twenty-three healthy, but overweight people completed 6 months of daily resveratrol intake (200 mg ― the commercial brand I take has 300 mg/capsule). A paired control group got placebo pills. A double-blind design assured that neither the subjects nor the experimenters knew which individuals were in each group during data processing. Memory tests of word recall revealed significant improvement in the resveratrol group. Resveratrol also increased brain-scan measures of functional connectivity, which identified linked neural activity between the hippocampus and several areas of cerebral cortex.

Because others had shown that resveratrol increased insulin sensitivity in humans, these authors examine several markers important to diabetes. Resveratrol decreased the standing levels of sugar-bound hemoglobin, a standard marker for glucose control.  

What foods besides red grapes have resveratrol? The most likely other sources you would eat or drink are blueberries, cranberries, and peanuts. It is not likely that you could drink or eat enough of such substances to get enough resveratrol to do much good. Because of the scientifically documented benefits of resveratrol, highly concentrated supplements are now on the market (I have been taking it for a couple of years). I haven't given up my two glasses of red wine each day, but I have started taking one of the supplements. I haven't seen any reports that high doses of resveratrol are toxic.

---

[1] http://thankyoubrain.blogspot.com/2010/04/resveratrol-red-wine-magic-chemical.htmlApril 4, 2010.

[2] Schmatz R, et al. (2009). Resveratrol prevents memory deficits and the increase in acetylcholinesterase activity in streptozotocin-induced diabetic rats. Eur J Pharmacol. 2009 May 21;610(1-3):42-8. Epub 2009 Mar 19.

[3] Kumar, A. et al. 2007. Neuroprotective effects of resveratrol against intracerebroventricular colchicine-induced cognitive impairment and oxidative stress in rats. Pharmacology.79 (1): 17-26. DOI: 10.1159/000097511

[4] Abraham, J., and Johnson, R. W. 2009. Consuming a diet supplemented with resveratrol reduced infection-related neuroinflammation and deficits in working memory in aged mice. Rejuvenation research. 12 (6): 445-453.  DOI: 10.1089/rej.2009.0888

[5]Smoliga, J. M. et al. (2011). Resveratrol and health – a comprehensive review of human clinical trials.  Mol. Nutrition Food Res. 55: 1129-1141

[6] Witte, A. V., et al. (2014) Effects of resveratrol on memory performance, hippocampal functional connectivity, and glucose metabolism in healthy older adults. J. Neuroscience. 34 23): 7862-7870.

"Memory Medic's latest book is for seniors (Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain. Memory Is the Canary in Your Brain's Coal Mine," available in inexpensive e-book format at https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/496252.  See also his recent book, "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

“Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness:” some people might argue that the U.S. Constitution endorses hedonism, and indeed many politicians want to ignore or get rid of the Constitution, but not necessarily because of hedonism. We should not be dismissive about encouraging people to pursue happiness. Happiness can be good for your brain. Depression is surely bad for your brain.

Positive mood states promote more effective thinking and problem solving. A recent scholarly report[1] reviews the literature demonstrating that positive mood broadens the scope of attentiveness, enhances semantic associations over a wider range, improves task shifting, and improves problem-solving capability. The review also documents the changes in brain activation patterns induced by positive mood in subjects while solving problems. Especially important is the dopamine signaling in the prefrontal cortex.

Published studies reveal that a variety of techniques are used to momentarily manipulate mood. These have included making subjects temporarily happy or sad by asking subjects to recall emotionally corresponding past experiences or to view film clips or hear words that trigger happy or sad feelings,

The effect of happiness on broadened attentiveness arises because the brain has better cognitive flexibility and executive control, which in turn makes it easier to be more flexible and creative. Happy problem solvers are better able to select and act upon useful solutions that otherwise never consciously surface. Happiness reduces perseverative tendencies for errant problem-solving strategies. The broadened attentiveness, for example, allows people to attend to more stimuli, both in external visual space and in internal semantic space, which in turn enables more holistic processing. For example, in one cited study, experimenters manipulated subjects’ momentary mood and then measured performance on a task involving matching of visual objects based on their global versus local shapes. Happy moods yielded better global matching.

Other experiments report broader word association performance when subjects are manipulated to be happier. For example, subjects in a neutral mood would typically associate the word “pen” as a writing tool and would associate it with words like pencil or paper. But positive mood subjects would think also of pen as an enclosure and associate it with words like barn or pigs. This effect has been demonstrated with practical effect in physicians, who, when in a happy mood, thought of more disease possibilities in making a differential diagnosis.
The review authors reported their own experiment on beneficial happy mood effects on insightfulness, using a task in which subjects were given three words and asked to think of a fourth word that could be combined into a compound word or phrase. For example, an insightful response to “tooth, potato, and heart” might be “sweet tooth, sweet potato, and sweetheart.” Generating such insight typically requires one to suppress dominant “knee jerk” responses such as associating tooth with pain and recognize that pain does not fit potato while at the same time becoming capable of switching to non-dominant alternatives.

Other cited experiments showed that happy mood improved performance on “Duncker’s candle task.”  Here, subjects are given a box of tacks, a candle, and a book of matches, and are asked to attach a candle to the wall in a way that will burn without dripping wax on the floor. Subjects in a happy mood were more able to realize that the box could be a platform for the candle when the box is tacked to the wall.  

Such effects of happy moods seem to arise from increased neural activity in the prefrontal cortex and cingulate cortex, areas that numerous prior studies have demonstrated as crucial parts of the brain’s executive control network. Similar effects have been observed in EEG studies. Other research suggests that the happiness effect is mediated by increased release of dopamine in the cortex that serves to up-regulate executive control.
The review authors described a meta-analysis of 49 positive-psychology manipulation studies showing that momentary happiness is readily manipulated by such strategies as deliberate optimistic thinking, increased attention to and memory of happy experiences, practicing mindfulness and acceptance, and increasing socialization. The effect occurs in most normal people and even in people with depression, anxiety, and schizophrenia. Biofeedback training, where subjects monitor their own fMRI scans or EEGs, might be an even more effective way for people to train themselves to be happier.

The main point is that people can be as happy as they choose to be.

For more on how positive mood influences memory ability, see my new book, Memory Power 101 (http://skyhorsepublishing.com ). Memory Medic's latest book explores the biology of mind. See "Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate" (Prometheus).

[1] Subramaniam, K. and Vinogradov, S. (2013). Improving the neural mechanisms of cognition through the pursuit of happiness. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. 7 August. Doi: 10.3389/fnhum.2013.00452

What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence.

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

·         West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.

·         National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.

·         College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit.

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle." Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit has a payoff.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source:

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

In response to the trend to abolish teaching of cursive in schools, about a year ago I posted an article on what I thought were the developmental benefits of handwriting (http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/memory-medic/201303/why-writing-hand-could-make-you-smarter). That post has generated over 230 comments.

Now there is evidence that handwriting of lecture notes, compared to typing on a laptop, improves learning by college students. Following up on prior studies that indicated relative ineffectiveness of taking notes by laptop, researchers Pam Meuller and Daniel Oppenheimer provide clear evidence that handwritten note-taking produces better learning in college students.

They reported three experiments that compared the efficacy of college students taking notes by handwriting or with a lap top. Those who used handwritten notes that they studied later scored significantly higher than students using laptops, including fleet typists who took vastly more copious notes. Handwriters took fewer notes overall with less verbatim recording. There are many possible explanations, beginning with the "less is more" idea in which too much information produces cognitive overload. Notably, when the typing students were told to avoid verbatim notes, they still did it. This suggests that there is something about typing that leads to mindless processing.  Handwritten notes involve more thought, re-framing, and re-organization, all of which promote better understanding and retention. The manual act of handwriting requires more engagement with the subject matter. Finally, handwritten notes capitalize on the use of drawings and of personalized spatial layout of the notes. Memorization involves not only what the information is, but where it is spatially located.

Added note: Readers interested in education are invited to join our Neuro-education group on Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=4883556&trk=my_groups-tile-grp)

Mueller, P. A., and Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science. 23 April. DOI: 10.1177/0956797614524581. http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/04/22/0956797614524581

The chart below is telling: SAT scores have been flat for over 40 years while education spending has increased 140%. Though this is Texas, I have seen similar data for other states.

 At the national level, federal government educational spending has skyrocketed, with no comparable improvement in educational outcomes.

 Clearly, the data debunk the supposition that more money is needed to fix education. What about changing standards and curricula? What have we got to show for all the reforms in the last 40 years such as Head Start, New Math, Nation at Risk, Goals 2000, Race to the Top, No Child Left Behind, charter schools, Next Generation Science Standards, and Common Core?

Could it be that we are trying to apply right answers to the wrong problems? If money, revised standards and curricula, and high-stakes testing are not the real problems, what is?

I think the real problem is that students generally lack learning competencies. Amazingly, schools tell students more about what to learn than how to learn. I think that such schooling has it backwards. In my view, the main goal of school should be to motivate students to learn and to teach them how to do it. Good schooling also ought to cultivate good academic taste, that is, the ability to distinguish principle from fact, useful information from trivia, logical analysis from specious argumentation, and intellectual excellence from superstition, myth, and falsehood. With that accomplished most everything else will fall into place.

What do I mean by "learning competencies?" In this post, I will just identify the competencies needed for effective learning as follows:

Organization

Understanding

Synthesis

Memory

Application

Creativity

In a follow-on post, I will explain what I think teachers can do to promote student development of these learning competencies. The corollary is that Colleges of Education need to be doing more research on these competencies and provide more instruction to pre-service teachers on how to teach learning competencies. In short, what is the smart way to address the real problem in education?

Dr. Klemm has a new book, Mental Biology, The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. See review: http://www.nyjournalofbooks.com/book-review/mental-biology-klemm

To follow up my prior post on jazz, I just read a scientific report published last week that suggests that training of musical creativity in jazz causes long-lasting changes in brain function. In this study, musicians completed a questionnaire that allowed researchers to know the extent of each subject's prior classical and jazz training. Functional MRI brain scans were taken with subjects lying down on their back with a piano keyboard on their lap, playing improvisations with their right hand. Ear phones allowed players to hear their improvisations.

Brain scan showed distinct activity differences in the jazz musicians and that difference was greater in those with longer jazz histories. Past improvisation experience increased the functional bilateral connectivity of the dorsal premotor cortex, the pre-supplemental motor areas of cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. Decreased activity connectivity was noted in executive control frontal-parietal areas. Thus, it would seem that creativity training, in jazz at least, changes the brain at a network level. Presumably, these connectivity changes were created by past histories in learning jazz and no doubt facilitated improvisation by automating some of the neural functions needed to perform it.

How do we interpret the decreased activity in executive-control areas of cortex? Multiple other brain-scan studies in other contexts have indicated that as a brain becomes proficient in a certain task, apparently less neural tissue is needed to perform the task. Decreased activity can therefore indicate task mastery.
Scientists have known for a decade or more that learning and memory in general change both brain anatomy and function. Such changes are typically linked to the neural requirements for performing specific kinds of tasks. This study of classical and jazz musicians follows on prior studies showing that musical training does change the brain. For example, violin players have enhanced neural activity in the motor cortex controlling hand movements. The relative size of the left and right motor cortex differs between piano and string players.

The importance of this present study is that it demonstrates that the brain change depends on the kind of musical training and appears to be selective for improvisation. Moreover, musical improvisational training affects more than just control over movements and extends to cognitive functions needed to improvise. Improvisation is a creative act that apparently recruits cortical circuits to support it and in the process rewires the brain to facilitate improvisation.

Improvisation relies heavily on memory of previously learned musical patterns and implementation strategies. Jazz players call this "musical vocabulary." Thus, jazz players have to become musicians first, then learn how to improvise. Because memory is a "process in a population, not a thing in a place," neural representation of musical vocabulary is probably widely distributed, and the brain must learn how to recruit connections from multiple brain areas and integrate them in real time in the prefrontal and movement-control parts of the brain, which apparently generate creative ideas and implement them.


Source:

Pinho, A. L. et al. (2014) Connecting to create: expertise in musical improvisation is associated with increased functional connectivity between premotor and prefrontal areas. J. Neuroscience. 34 (18): 6156-6163. doi: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4769.13-2014.

                         Memory Medic has a new book being distributed by Random House: 

                         Mental Biology. The New Science of How the Brain and Mind Relate.

I just got back from my second trip to the Katy Jazz festival, run by a school district just West of Houston. It was time for a jazz fix. You see, I am a jazz fan, and though not compulsive, I do need to dash occasionally to New Orleans or go to a festival like the one in Katy.

How does one become a jazz fan, particularly somebody like me who doesn't know much about music and who can't stand 200-year-old church music or the new mind-numbing songs in so many "contemporary" services. For Texas students who live in enlightened districts like Katy ISD, jazz appreciation starts as early as middle school in the larger schools that spin off jazz training from their marching and concert bands.

My fanhood began in the summer when I turned 19. After finishing my freshman year at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, a fraternity brother talked me into spending the summer in Hollywood, where his family had moved. He steered me around all the clubs and concert venues, and I saw in person jazz icons like Stan Kenton, Cab Calloway, Gerry Mulligan, Louie Belson, Chet Baker, Shelley Mann, and Shorty Rogers. My buddy and I would even spend a whole evening listening to Dave Brubeck and Joe Morello for the price of one beer, which we managed to take three hours to milk.

At first, I thought what I was hearing was just unstructured noise. My buddy explained what was going on, usually opening with the tune's melody line, then improvising on that melody line, and then gracefully finding the way back home to the tune's opening statement. And I didn't need to know musical details to appreciate the rhythms that flowed through my body like honey on a warm biscuit.

I am since learning a lot at the Katy festival where some 12 schools showed off their jazz bands and subsumed combos. The festival also featured sets from eight professional combos. But the really important part is that the student groups are given critiques by professional musicians, many of whom are or have been college music professors. The critiques are miked so the audience can hear. From such instruction I am learning that really big things are happening in the brain's mental biology as one listens to or plays jazz.

First the listening: the most obvious effect is stress reduction. Stress, as I have explained in early posts, is the arch-enemy of memory ability. In my case, I put my West Coast jazz experience to good use in mastering the veterinary curriculum at Auburn. While classmates were beating their brains up trying to learn all the stuff involved in veterinary medicine (more than in human medicine), I spent a lot of my time listening to jazz records. And I still beat all but four classmates in grades.

Listening is also fun, probably less so than playing jazz, but still a lot of fun. In San Antonio, Jim Cullum's band used to be called the "Happy Jazz Band." Think about where jazz came from. It is uniquely an American innovation, beginning as emotional relief for slaves who found comfort in the blues, which eventually spawned jazz in its happier forms. Wholesome fun promotes happiness. Happy brains learn better. They can also often live longer (remember my blog on the long life span of so many stand-up comedians). Think about Preservation Hall in New Orleans. There and elsewhere around the country, many jazz artists are still performing sophisticated music in their 80s.

 As for mental biology, a jazz player experiences enormous mental stimulation, Even as a listener, after a concert my untrained brain churns out a continuous stream of improvisation in my mind's ear that can include multiple instruments that I have no idea how to play. A player has to engage the brain in multiple ways that classical musicians do not. First, there are added technical requirements, such as playing blue notes, swinging eighth notes, and unusual time signatures like 12/8 and 5/4 or complex African or Latin rhythms.  Then there is the huge challenge of improvisation, which is basically composing on the fly. When improvising, there is a safety net of knowing the proper chord structure and melody, but players have to have a huge musical vocabulary and realize in milliseconds what new notes will fit. They also have to listen hard so they can interact properly with what others in the band are playing. The "call and response" paradigm in jazz is actually musical conversation. I can't think of anything more mentally demanding, especially for youngsters in early stages of learning music. Early middle school is a particularly time-sensitive period for mental development, and I suspect that middle school jazz bands can have disproportionate beneficial effects on brain development.

Learning jazz may be the ultimate in training young minds to think critically and creatively. An earlier blog post after my fist trip to the Katy festival focused on the exceptional teaching skills of jazz band directors. Many teachers protested, saying in essence that anybody can teach good students. Regular teachers get stuck with so many underachievers. Maybe we should consider the possibility that jazz-band students are such high achievers because their jazz training has trained their brains in invaluable learning capacities for hand-eye coordination, the ability to memorize, discipline, patience, critical and creative thinking, high-speed intellectual engagement with the ideas of others, and self-actualization and confidence.

There is overwhelming scientific evidence that mental challenge develops new connections in the brain and with it, new biological capabilities. In jazz, such mental enrichment enhances the ability to memorize, not only directly in terms of having to learn a large musical vocabulary and the rules of jazz, but also in terms of basic mental biology. My new book, Mental Biology, explains some of the basic ideas.

Scientific and philosophical fashion these days is to claim that humans have no free will. That is, we are basically biological robots, driven to our thoughts, beliefs, and actions by unconscious forces in our brain. Our genes and our experiential programming control everything we do. Free will is an illusion.

So goes the assertions of a clutch of activist scientists, such as Richard, Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Wegner, who have probably gotten rich off their best-seller books arguing the case against free will.

Religion is also nailed to the cross, so to speak. Ideas of moral responsibility originate in views of right and wrong, and every religion expects that followers have the capacity to make the correct choices. Their free-will capacity makes them morally responsible. I think it is no accident that most of the illusory free-will activists I have read are also activists for atheism. Otherwise, their position would be cognitively dissonant.

Legal issues arise, as stated by the legal analyst Jeffrey Rosen, who wrote in The New York Times Magazine, “Since all behavior is caused by our brains, wouldn’t this mean all behavior could potentially be excused? … The death of free will, or its exposure as a convenient illusion, some worry, could wreak havoc on our sense of moral and legal responsibility.”

There are serious social consequences attached to accepting the premise of illusory free will. One is the obvious conclusion one should draw that consciously willed effort to improve oneself or lot in life is futile.

Another consequence of such thinking is the need to proclaim, as many scientists now do, that consciousness cannot do anything. Freely chosen actions would have to come from a conscious brain. Therefore, the conscious brain must not be the source of actions that occur during consciousness. Consciousness is thus seen as audience watching a movie of what is happening.

Of course, the futility argument is not evidence for free will. It is however, a practical reason to believe in it, for otherwise people would not make much effort to change and improve themselves. They would otherwise become intellectually and emotionally paralyzed by such nihilism.

This is not the place to elaborate the research that neuroscientists claim provides the basis for asserting illusory free will. I do that in my just-released book, Mental Biology: The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. I point out the uncontrolled variables in the experiments conducted in the 1980s that purported to show there is no free will. Subsequent reports that confirmed those findings had the same poorly controlled variables. Moreover, there are some new studies using better designs that show that the original findings do not withstand scrutiny.

So, is there a reasoned counter-argument? Eddy Nahmias points out that "the sciences of the mind do give us good reasons to think that our minds are made of matter. But to conclude that consciousness or free will is thereby an illusion is too quick. It is like inferring from discoveries in organic chemistry that life is an illusion just because living organisms are made up of non-living stuff."

In my new book, I have a large section defending the position that consciousness IS able to do things, among them exerting at least a significant modicum of freely chosen thoughts and actions. One line of argument, which is in line with the learning and memory theme of this blog site, is memorization. It is true that the brain is forming memories of a day's events while you sleep and obviously unconscious. But the initial encoding and working memory are performed while you are conscious. Moreover, conscious use of mnemonic devices profoundly enhances the formation of memory, as I will demonstrate in future posts about how "memory athletes" do such astonishing working-memory feats as learning the sequence of a shuffled deck of cards in a minute and a half or memorizing 80-digit number strings. Conscious use of mnemonics is required. Using these mnemonics is challenging, requiring intense selective attention and strongly will executive functions. You obviously cannot do such things when you are unconscious.

Skeptics will say that such feats are all driven and performed by the unconscious mind and that consciousness is just around to realize it has happened. But consciousness is also around to recite what was memorized. Try that in your sleep.

Sources:

Klemm, W. R. (2014). Mental Biology. The New Science of How Brain and Mind Relate. New York: Prometheus.

Nahmias, Eddy (2011). Is neuroscience the death of free will? New York Times. http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/13/is-neuroscience-the-death-of-free-will/?_php=true&_type=blogs&_r=0

In the last couple of columns I have been explaining how stereotyping affects performance. For example if seniors buy into the stereotype that they are supposed to have failing memories they are more likely to have failing memories. How you identify yourself (young, old, male, female, and so on) is a key factor in how you will respond to advertising. Indeed, self-identity creates all kinds of bias, from the sports team you root for to the candidate you want to become President.

Marketing research has established that most consumer decisions are memory based. You buy something because you remember a persuasive ad for it. Thus, advertisers seek to find ways to get consumers to remember their products and services. One obvious way is to repeat the ad over and over. But that costs a lot of money.

One advertising strategy is to target consumers with promotions that capitalize on social identity. The idea is that you will prefer a product that is pitched to your identity. No doubt you have seen the TV ads on reverse mortgages, where a clearly older celebrity makes the pitch. You are supposed to be persuaded by the ad because you can identify with such a person. He’s a senior, you’re a senior. He’s a star, and you can imagine how great it might feel if you were one. In other words, your personal identity is wrapped up in how responsive you are to a given ad. This same principle is at work in ads that use beautiful models to sell clothes and star athletes to sell athletic gear.

Social identity can be threatened when the ad presents events, information, or choices in a way that is inconsistent or negative. A senior, for example, would not be persuaded to consider reverse mortgages if the salesman was a young and gorgeous female model. Recent studies show that these kinds of cognitive disconnect interfere with how consumers encode and remember advertising messages. Advertisers certainly don’t want to create identity-threat ads because consumers will be automatically motivated to forget the ads.

The process of motivated forgetting is being explored by Hong Kong University marketing professor, Amy Dalton and her colleague, Li Huang. When people see or hear an ad that presents identity threat, they are automatically motivated to forget it. It’s a defense mechanism. Naturally, the effect is greatest in people who have the strongest in-group identities. That’s why advertisers have to be really careful in ads that involve such emotionally charges matters as gender, race, religion, or political belief.

In their studies, they use identity linked promotions, such as “Ladies get one drink free,” or “10% discount for Seniors,” and the like. To enhance attention and encoding, they prime the experimental audience ahead of time to reinforce the intended identity. In one experiment, they primed a social identity, produced identity-linked promotions, introduced social identity-threat, and then tested for memory of the promotions.

For example, experimental subjects were students. Students were primed about their student identity by telling them that the experiment was being performed also with students at other universities. Students then watched 20 print ads for three seconds each and told they would be quizzed on how much they remember of the ads. Identity-linked promotions were created for eight of the ads by stating that “Additional 10% discount for Hong Kong University students.” Then students read news reports about their university, either neutral reports or negative ones (in the identity-threat group).

 What they found was that identity strength enhanced memory for identity-linked promotions if the identity had been primed. When the primed identity was threatened, ad memory was impaired, reflecting the motivated forgetting effect.

A related experiment tested the role of the news source for neutral and negative-identity conditions. Identity strength increased the resistance to read news from a source that presented an identity threat but not in control conditions. This may explain why some people steadfastly get their news from a single distinct identity source, such as NBC (more liberal viewers) or Fox News (more conservative viewers). Such loyalties minimize identity threat and make the news and opinion better remembered. Obviously, such loyalties contribute to political polarization. In U.S. politics, voters are not identified as people. They are identified as voting blocs (Blacks, Hispanics, seniors, females, millennials, poor, rich, and so on). Often these groups are pitted against each other (as in “the rich exploit the poor, blacks are victims of white racism,” and so on). What politicians exploit is social identity.

While identity politics is old hat, consumer identity research is in early stages. But you can bet there will be more such research, as advertisers have their own motivations: spend less money through fewer ads, make their ads more memorable, and get you to spend more money.

Source:

Dalton, Amy N., and Li Huang. 2013. Motivated forgetting in response to social identity threat. J. Consumer Research. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/674198