New research published in the July issue of Cognition indicates that using gestures while studying can dramatically improve learning and memory.

The study, done by Susan Wagner Cook at the University of Rochester, showed that kids asked to physically gesture at math problems were almost three times more likely than non-gesturers to remember what they learned.

Cook suggests that gestures represent "an additional and potent avenue for taking in information".

In the study, students were asked to learn algebraic concepts. When using speech only to learn, 33% of students remembered the lesson. When using gestures, however, 90% of students retained the lesson.

If you’d like to read some more articles on gesturing published by Susan Cook, here are some PDF files:

• The Role of Gesture in Learning: Do children use their hands to change their minds?
• How our hands help us learn
• Probing the Mental Representation of Gesture: Is handwaving spatial?
• Explaining Math: Gesturing lightens the load

Earlier articles on the smartkit site which you may find helpful on the topic of learning strategies and improving memory include:

• Learning Strategies: How one study tip can significantly improve your memory
• Accelerated Learning and Improved memory via Distributed Practice
• What sleep research can teach us about unlocking learning potential: Crucial student study skills
• What every college student should know about ‘The All-Nighter"
• Students: Self-Test to improve your memory

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Note: The Mindfit software is currently available for purchase in the Smartkit Store here. Below you can read why the founder of the Smartkit website-a fellowship trained, board certified neurologist- decided to offer it for sale in the Smartkit store.

This article presents a review of Mindfit- a new computer program geared to train your brain. Many brain fitness programs have been released over the past year, and I have found this to be one of the most promising. As such, we’ve decided it’d be an appropriate addition to the smartkit store.

In a nutshell, Mindfit is a computerized brain gym designed to be used over an 8-12 month period of time (although you can still practice with the exercises after your training period is over).

It starts with several evaluation sessions, which are used to tailor the computer exercises to your specific abilities. The developers refer to this system as ITS- an Individualized Training System that adapts the difficulty level of the exercises to your abilities and performance as you advance.

After the evaluation session is complete, you train on Mindfit three times per week, 20 minutes a day, for 8 weeks. This process is repeated 3 times for a total of 3 rounds and 72 training sessions.

One important feature of Mindfit is that it continually provides feedback and analyzes your performance as you progress.

Another nice feature of Mindfit is that it tackles multiple cognitive domains. Many people think that by doing crossword puzzles every day (or more recently Sudoku puzzles), they’re doing a great job of exercising their brains. Unfortunately, this is just not true. To best train and sharpen your mind, you need to challenge it with lots of different puzzle types and activities. Novelty and challenge are crucial- otherwise you just won’t get the optimal benefit. Mindfit takes this into account, and features 14 skill areas that it goes to work on. These include:

• Working Memory
• Visual Short term memory
• Auditory short term memory
• Spatial Perception
• Planning
• Location Memory
• Naming
• Time estimation
• Inhibition
• Divided attention
• Hand-eye coordination

Is Mindfit for everybody? No. The exercises and overall difficulty level of the programs are mainly geared towards seniors, so I think those who are 50+ will find it most useful. However, because the software adapts to each individuals ability, even those younger can be challenged. Importantly, the developers have done an excellent job in making this software extremely easy to use. I suspect those who’ve never even sat down with a computer before will find it simple to set up and get started.

Over the last several years, quite a bit of research has come out showing that brain training exercises can in fact boost cognitive function (Click here to read about one of the most recent studies that appeared in JAMA, click here to read about a double-blind clinical trial that specifically showed MindFit improved short-term memory, spatial processing and attention/focus). For seniors looking to invest in a computerized brain gym, Mindfit represents a sophisticated piece of software that’s surprisingly easy to use.

Mindfit Demos:

Mindfit Demo #1: "Colored Walls"

Mindfit Demo #2: Picture Match"

MindFit Demo#3: Shape Arrangement"

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Researchers in Ireland have found that brain exercises in the form of rote memorization of poems, articles, and short stories leads to memory improvement.

The study was done on healthy adults aged between 55 and 70. They underwent six weeks of intensive brain exercises involving rote memorization of a newspaper articles or poems of 500 words, followed by six weeks of rest.

Interestingly, the improvement was not seen immediately. When the study participants were tested 6 weeks later, however, a clear improvement in verbal and episodic memory was noted.

Furthermore, changes were actually detected in the hippocampus via high tech brain scans called Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (MRS).

Dr. Richard Roche, a co-author of the study from the Department of Psychology at National University of Ireland in Maynooth:

The brain is like a muscle that should be exercised through the retirement years as a defense against dementia, cognitive lapses and memory failure

You can read more about the rote memory training study here. For an earlier smartkit article that discusses how brain training exercises can improve memory and cognitive function, click here.

For computer software that can enhance cognitive function, check out this review of  Mindfit  

[Reference: McNulty, J,. Paul Brennan, M.D., Colin P. Doherty, M.D., D. McMackin, M.D., S. Sukumaran, M.D., I.H. Robertson, Ph.D., M.A. Mangaoang, Ph.D., S.M. O'Mara, D.Phil., Sinead L. Mullally, Ph.D., J. Hayden, B.A., J. Prendergast, B.Sc., and M. Fitzsimons, Ph.D.. The Identification of Neurometabolic Sequelae Post-learning Using Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. Presented November 26 at the annual meeting of the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA)]

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You’ve decided you’ve got four hours this weekend to review for your psychology exam. Is it better to do it all in one 4-hour session, or divide it up into four separate 1-hour sessions? The first strategy is referred to as massed practice, and the second is referred to as distributed practice.

It turns out overwhelming evidence supports the distributed practice strategy as the better of the two.

How much of a difference can distributed practice make? Let’s say you had a list of 100 vocabulary words to learn for your foreign language class. If your test was tomorrow, it might take you 50 times to study the list so that you know the words perfectly. However, if your test was 3 days from now, and you distributed your practice over 3 days, it might take you only 28 times to study the list to know the words perfectly. In other words, you’d be able to cut study time nearly in half with the same results.

Sound too good to be true? These are the same kind of results a famous German scientist (Ebbinghaus) got when he did some of the first distributed practice experiments back in 1885.

Since then, a considerable amount of research has accumulated demonstrating the wide applicability and power of this technique. For example, distributed practice has shown to greatly benefit the learning of diverse types of information, tasks, and skills, such as:

• Foreign languages
• Science
• History
• Mathematics (from the elementary to the college level)
• Games
• And even motor skills, including sports, playing musical instruments, dance, and so on.

One scientific paper [Reference below] reviewed dozens of other published research studies involving distributed practice. This meta-analysis found the effect size for distributed practice to be huge. To put the statistics into perspective, the average person getting distributed training remembered better than about 67 percent of the people getting massed training.

Since most of us do not distribute our studying over multiple sessions, this tip represents an important way many can accelerate learning and improve memory. Accelerated learning and memory are worth much more than just getting your through exams. Better memory will help you out in just about every aspect of your life from household errands to playing the best hand in a poker game.

Reference: Donovan JJ, Radosevich DR. A meta-analytic review of the distribution of practice effect: Now you see it, now you don’t. Journal of Applied Psychology. 1999;84(795-805).

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Marijuana

This bit really caught me by surprise: Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have found that the active ingredient in marijuana (THC) appears to be quite effective in preventing the brain buildup of amyloid plaque. Amyloid is one of the main pathologic markers for Alzheimer’s disease.

Additionally, the study found that THC also inhibits the enzyme acetylcholinesterase. This is the mechanism by which current Alzheimer drugs work to improve symptoms (but not reverse underlying disease process).

Kim Janda, PhD at Scripps notes:

While we are certainly not advocating the use of illegal drugs, these findings offer convincing evidence that THC possesses remarkable inhibitory qualities, especially when compared to AChE inhibitors currently available to patients

For a link to the article’s abstract, click here. To read the release on the Scripps Research Institute web site, click here.

Club Moss & Huperzine A

The National Institutes of Health is conducting a study to examine the effectiveness of Huperzine A, a natural chemical derived from an herb called Chinese Club Moss.

If you know someone with Alzheimer’s disease who may be interested in enrolling in this drug study, click here for a list of U.S. drug trial sites.

If you’d like to learn more about what Club Moss and Huperzine do in the brain, click here for an earlier smartkit post.

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This article reveals what modern neuroscience has learned about sleep as it applies to learning and memory. I believe this information can be of great benefit not only to students looking to improve their study skills, but to anyone interested in improving their memory and learning potential.

Most of us think of sleep as a time of rest … a time when the brain
settles down, relaxes, and becomes quiet. After a busy day of attending classes, talking with friends, studying, and stressing out, the brain finally gets to shut down and take a break from it all. Sounds logical, right? Well, that’s not quite what happens. Actually, when you’re asleep, your brain is continuing to learn the material you’ve been exposed to during the day.

You Sleep, But Your Brain Works

Dozens of intriguing studies over the past several years show clearly
that your brain is active—very active—during sleep. (Reference 1-7) It’s busy doing something miraculous, something that we can’t even come close to explaining.

Basically, your brain goes on automatic pilot. Without your being aware of it, something inside your head comes alive and starts mulling over all the things you learned that day. It sorts through them, organizes them, considers them, calculates them, decides what’s important and what’s not.

From all the information that your brain soaked up during the day, it derives meaning. It works through unsolved problems and somehow comes up with answers. Its powers, however, extend even farther than that. A spooky awareness speeds through neural circuits. As it does so, it changes the physical structure of brain cells so that specific pieces of knowledge are etched more permanently in memory. In the neurologic literature, these miraculous processes are referred to as consolidation.

What your brain is doing, without any conscious effort on your part, includes:

• reviewing,
• sorting,
• organizing,
• prioritizing,
• problem solving, and
• memorizing.

All this is happening while you sleep! As you can see, effortless sleep-learning is not only possible, it is a reality.

The amazing truth is that learning continues after the actual studying is done. In fact, research indicates the maximum benefit of all your hard hours of studying comes about only after a good night’s sleep.

Furthermore, even though you may have stopped studying, knowledge and skills continue to improve over several nights of sleep. Although sleep on the first night following training offers the most dramatic benefit, subsequent nights of sleep continue to provide smaller, less pronounced gains.(Reference 2)

Consolidation and Physical Skills

Athletes, pianists, surgeons, and video game addicts take note: This process applies to learning not just information but motor skills as well. One recent study showed that sleep after practice enhanced the speed of skilled motor performance by 33.5 percent on average and reduced the error rate by 30 percent, as compared with corresponding intervals of wakefulness.(Reference 7)

To extend this concept just a little bit further: Amazingly, learning does not stop when practicing and studying end. It turns out that performance and learning improvement occur not only during sleep but also during periods of wakefulness. (Reference 2,7) After you finish reading a chapter, your brain goes to work on that information over the next few hours, slowly learning and consolidating it. This subconscious processing of learning information is above and beyond what you did consciously during your actual study session.

An everyday example of this subconscious processing is the tip-of-the-tongue phenomenon. Try as you might, when asked, to remember the name of a movie, store, or restaurant, you may find that you can’t. But several minutes or even hours later, it may come to you like a flash of lighting out of the blue. Why? Without your conscious knowledge, that spooky awareness we talked about earlier spreads through your neural networks, searching for the answer. When your brain finally finds the item you were seeking, it tosses it back up for your conscious mind to grasp. Imagine what happens when you throw a stone into a pond: The effect of the stone upon the water does not cease at impact. Long after the rock hits the water, waveforms slowly ripple out toward the periphery. So it is with the mind. When you ask something of it, the neural reverberations of the question (the “rock”) persist long after the question is asked.

Key Findings of Consolidation Research

So what, in brief, do we know about how the brain consolidates information?

• Development of procedural/motor skills does not stop when practice ends but continues over hours.
• Development of memory does not stop when studying ends but continues over hours.
• Neural activities during sleep contribute significantly to the formation of different types of memories and skills.
• For a given period of sleep vs. one of wakefulness, consolidation will be greater with sleep.
• The first nightly sleep period after practicing or studying is extremely important for starting consolidation of the skill or memory. Going without this initial first night of sleep will have a very negative effect on the consolidation of that particular skill or memory.

Making the Most of Sleep Learning (consolidation)

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