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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This important strategy should help improve your learning efficiency and memory. It’s presented in college student context, but of course applies to anyone looking for a good study tip.

Imagine that a psychology lecture has just let out. The vast majority of students will wait several weeks to review their lecture notes. Unfortunately, when they do so, very little of what they’ve written will make sense. The notes will be difficult to follow, and the content hard to understand. They might as well be seeing the material for the first time. Why? The answer is simple: Their memory of the material has long since decayed.

Why does forgetting happen?

Most students incorrectly believe that after learning new information, they steadily forget a little bit each and every day that passes.

This is a myth. Actually, newly learned information has a relatively short half-life in your brain. This fact is demonstrated very nicely by the forgetting curve.

The forgetting curve is not a new phenomenon. German psychologists (e.g., Herman Ebbinghaus) were plotting these curves 150 years ago. Since that time, a great deal of accumulated data has supported their validity. Take a look at the forgetting curve shown here:

The peak of the curve (T) represents your memory for material immediately after the learning session—let’s say the end of a lecture. Now, we can conclude 2 things from the curve: The Obvious and the Not-so-Obvious.

The Obvious:

We can see it makes no sense to wait until midterms or final exams to do your first review (that is, to wait until Day 30 or longer on the above graph). By that time, you’ll have forgotten more than 95 percent of the material. You’ll feel as if you’re encountering the information in your notes for the first time, and what should take you only 4 minutes to review will now take you 40 minutes. The notes will look foreign because you won’t remember anything.

Not-so-Obvious:

However, there’s a more important conclusion we can reach from the curve: You don’t have to wait several weeks for this degree of forgetting to occur. Massive forgetting actually happens within hours of the initial learning session. Therefore, even those students who wait several days to review the material are in trouble! If you look carefully at the graph, you can see that even before Day 2 arrives, you will already have forgotten 40–70 percent of what you learned!

The crucial point is this: Make sure to review new material within hours of any initial learning episode.

The vast majority of students could save dozens of hours of study time per semester by using this one technique alone to markedly improve learning efficiency and memory.

Notice how a small investment up front pays huge dividends come exam time.

It is also worth noting that these recommendations apply not only to lectures, but to any academic learning—whether from a textbook, video, or computer learning session.

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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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What often separates ‘A’ students from average students is not necessarily intelligence, but rather time management skills and discipline.

Recently came across a clean & easy to use online time management system to help students better organize their school work and remain on task. The service is called GradeFix, and you can visit their website here.

Signup is painless, so I figured I’d try it out a bit. One key feature of Gradefix’s program are it’s algorithms, which break tasks down into smaller pieces and automatically distributes the work according to your time allowances. I supsect this important feature should enable many students to budget their time much more effectively.

The basic online version, which can keep track of up to 10 tasks, is free. Could’ve used something like this when I was back in school…

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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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Can certain smells boost brain power? Let’s first take a look at what else certain odors can do:

• Stores are now using special odors to make customers buy things and spend more money
• The leathery smell of a new car is an artificial odor sprayed on to enhance buyer satisfaction
• Casinos are using odors to make people gamble more
• London’s Heathrow Airport has used the scent of pine needles to reduce passenger tension and stress
• Bad odors can make people more aggressive.
• Olympic weight lifters have used smelling salts before competition to boost their strength
• Although going for a closed MRI scan can make people feel as if they’re getting buried alive, a vanilla-like odor has been shown to reduce anxiety by 63 percent in patients going for such a test. [Reference 1]

As you can see, smells are powerful forces that can change your mood and mindset. They have a surprising power to make us aggressive, happy, relaxed, anxious, focused, or aroused.

How can smells wield such power over us?

Odors can affect basic biologic processes. “Smell receptors” in your nose connect directly to the limbic area of the brain. (The limbic area is sometimes referred to as the “emotion center” of the brain.) The limbic area, in turn, connects to special brain regions that have major influences over basic bodily processes: (References 2-4)

• Heart rate
• Brain wave patterns (EEG)
• Blood pressure
• Muscle tension
• Skin temperature

Importantly, the limbic area also houses the hippocampus—the memory engine of the brain. Since smell signals project into the limbic area, it should not be too surprising, therefore, that smell can also affect memory. This leads us to the field of aromatherapy.

Aromatherapy seeks to capitalize on this nose-limbic system connection to enhance mental and physical well-being. Typically, its practitioners use essential oils (volatile organic oils derived from plants) to bring these changes about. While I am skeptical of many of the bold claims made for aromatherapy, certain studies have actually shown some real benefits and results.

Special odors can boost cognition

A study done in 2003 showed that rosemary could increase alertness. Additionally, it produced a “significant enhancement of performance for overall quality of memory and secondary memory factors”. (Reference 5)

Research out of the Neurological Clinic at the University of Kiel in Germany demonstrated that the essential oils of peppermint and eucalyptus increased cognitive performance. These same oils also had a muscle-relaxing and mentally relaxing effect. (Reference 6)

A survey of the aromatherapy literature also reveals this anecdotal evidence:

• Jasmine has been linked with an alert and awake mental state.
• Lavender may be good for reducing test anxiety or anxiety right before you give a speech. It may also be useful for reducing excess stress that may get in the way of studying.
• Vanilla lifts a person’s mood.
• Ginger is thought to promote alertness and stimulate cognition.
• Citrus is also felt to be energizing. Some companies are using lemon essential oils in offices to negate the effects of the post-lunch dip on alertness

Some cautions, however:

Odors may influence different people differently.

Just because essential oils come from plants does not mean that they are automatically safe. Be well informed before you use any essential oil. When not used properly, essential oils can do more harm than good.

"Aromatherapy for Dummies" by Kathi Keville is a good book to consult for more information on how to use essential oils responsibly.

Reference 1: Redd WH, Manne SL, Peters B, et al. Fragrance administration to reduce anxiety during MR imaging. J Magn Reson Imaging. Jul-Aug 1994;4(4):623-626.

Reference 2: Bensafi M, Rouby C, Farget V, et al. Autonomic nervous system responses to odours: the role of pleasantness and arousal. Chem Senses. Oct 2002;27(8):703-709.

Reference 3: Sanders C, Diego M, Fernandez M, et al. EEG asymmetry responses to lavender and rosemary aromas in adults and infants. Int J Neurosci. Nov 2002;112(11):1305-1320.

Reference 4: Kim YK, Watanuki S. Characteristics of electroencephalographic responses induced by a pleasant and an unpleasant odor. J Physiol Anthropol Appl Human Sci. Nov 2003;22(6):285-291.

Reference 5: Moss M, Cook J, Wesnes K, et al. Aromas of rosemary and lavender essential oils differentially affect cognition and mood in healthy adults. Int J Neurosci. Jan 2003;113(1):15-38.

Reference 6: Gobel H, Schmidt G, Soyka D. Effect of peppermint and eucalyptus oil preparations on neurophysiological and experimental algesimetric headache parameters. Cephalalgia. Jun 1994;14(3):228-234; discussion 182.

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