Last month we shared some tips and strategies for auditory learners. In the video below Graham Taylor addresses visual learners, explaining what visual learners can do to get the most out of their EPPP study.
Category: Brain and memory
Step Outside Your Comfort Zone and Stretch Yourself
In this video, memory and learning expert Joshua Foer explains how you can step outside your comfort zone and stretch yourself.
Foer is the author of Moonwalking With Einstein and an internationally recognized expert in memory and learning. Here Foer shares how he went from being a person with a merely average memory to holding the title for America’s foremost memory champion. His tips on memory and learning can encourage anyone preparing for the eppp examination.
The Myth of the Good Memory: how memory is a skill not a gift (Study Myths Part 2)
You’ve all heard people say “I have a bad memory.” Perhaps you’ve even said that about yourself. This type of statement reflects how we think about memory. We talk about memory like we might talk about our hair-color: it’s something we’re stuck with.
The basic idea is that each of us is born either having a good memory or having a bad memory. Accordingly, we tend to think (often unconsciously) that the world is divided between smart guys with good memories and dumb guys with bad memories. If you’re born in the latter camp of human beings, there isn’t much you can do about it.
The problem with this way of understanding memory is not simply that it is false but that it can be self-fulfilling. Believing we have been programmed with a bad memory, we fail to take the steps necessary for improving it.
From our earliest school days many of us unconsciously imbibe the myth that our ability to remember things is hardwired into our brains. In her groundbreaking book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck showed that elementary school experiences often reinforce habits of mind antithetical to success through inadvertently training many children think of intelligence as fixed. Specifically, children come to unconsciously assume that school tasks are performance opportunities to test how smart they are instead of invitations to stretch their intelligence further.
EPPP Strategies and Tips for Auditory Learners
Rethinking Age Stereotypes and Your EPPP Study
Our earlier post on psychology licensing prep for the elderly urged those of us who are elderly to begin to think positively about our age, to treat our age as an asset rather than a liability.
I thought of this again when I came across an article that Judith Graham wrote in the New York Times last year. “All of us have beliefs — many of them subconscious, dating back to childhood — about what it means to get older”, Graham observed. She continued:
Psychologists call these “age stereotypes.” And, it turns out, they can have an important effect on seniors’ health.
When stereotypes are negative — when seniors are convinced becoming old means becoming useless, helpless or devalued — they are less likely to seek preventive medical care and die earlier, and more likely to suffer memory loss and poor physical functioning, a growing body of research shows.
When stereotypes are positive — when older adults view age as a time of wisdom, self-realization and satisfaction — results point in the other direction, toward a higher level of functioning. The latest report, in The Journal of the American Medical Association, suggests that seniors with this positive bias are 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability.
For people who care about and interact with older people, the message is clear: your attitude counts because it can activate or potentially modify these deeply held age stereotypes.
The perpetuation of stereotypes happens because of the way cultural assumptions work on the malleability of human the brain. Research shows that environmental factors, including the implicit and subtle assumptions of the society where we were brought up, wire our brains in profound and significant ways. Our brains are ‘primed’ to accept certain things as normal which seem strange to other culture groups.
Memory Champion Joshua Foer on How He Improved His Memory
Oxygenating The Brain During Your EPPP Studies
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We all know that our bodies need some attention in order to grow and be healthy” writes Steve Riggs, “But what about our brain? What does it need to be able to grow, to heal, and to learn in the best way it can?”
This question is obviously of crucial importance as you prepare for the EPPP.
Riggs answered his own question in an article for The NACD Foundation (Volume 25 No. 5, 2012). He gives three easy steps for achieving a healthy and fully oxygenated brain:
Now what were those simple things that must be practiced for increasing oxygen to the brain? Here they are: 1) Breathe easily and normally with your belly in a relaxed way. 2) Breathe through your nose under normal conditions and not your mouth. 3) Take short walks throughout the day. Short walks will increase your circulation and increase oxygen to your brain, whereas while forced walks or runs may be good for you too, they also cause your muscles to absorb much of the oxygen in your system, and that hinders increasing the oxygen being carried to your brain.
Tips for Keeping Mentally Sharp with Age
In my post, ‘Training the Aging Brain in Your EPPP Preparation’, I suggested that preparing for the EPPP is just the type of brain-stretching activity that can keep the brain of a person in mid-life or older sharp. Here are some other activities you can do as you age to foster cognitive growth:
- Force yourself to participate in new social situations that will stretch you;
- Engage in activities that foster cognitive health, such as reading good quality literature’;
- Engage in physical exercise such as walking at least three times a week, if not every day (researchers from Tufts University found that exercise is the single most important factor in maintaining healthy functioning as individuals age);
- Don’t be afraid to make new friends and learn new skills;
- Go regularly to the brain-fitness gym and play brain exercises;
- Be attentive to nutrition;
- Maintain good relationships with family members and relatives;
- Don’t just live for yourself but look for ways to invest in younger people;
- Reject our culture’s stereotypes about aging.
This last point requires further attention, but that will be the subject of our next post.
Mid-Life and Neuroplasticity and Brain Plasticity
In three posts we published earlier this year, we looked at some of Sigmund Freud’s pioneering work in the field of brain plasticity. The posts where we explored this were:
- Freud and the ‘law of association by simultaneity’
- Neuroscience and the Freudian Revolution
- Free Association
Against the prevailing view of his day, Freud understood that the brain is not static, but that the cells that make up brain structures are malleable. Only recently has this been proven by neuroscience, creating the exciting new field of brain plasticity.
However, even the genius Freud failed to appreciate to appreciate the full implications of mid-life and neuroplasticity – just how plastic the brain is. In his 1905 paper ‘On Psychotherapy’ Sigmund Freud noted that ‘About the age of fifty, the elasticity of the mental processes on which treatment depends is, as a rule, lacking. Old people are no longer educable.’ Continue reading
Training the Aging Brain in Your EPPP Preparation
In Cumming and Henry’s 1961 book Growing Old, they showed that older adults will often purposely withdraw from society in preparation of death. A common pattern is that retirement correlates with social disengagement.
The reality is that the older we get the more disengaged we can tend to become, both mentally and socially. Although this happens, it is far from inevitable, necessary or unavoidable. There is nothing inherent in growing older that necessitates these changes, and those wishing to age well should make a conscious effort to stretch their brains in the same way that they should be attentive to exercise their bodies. Norman Doidge has written about the way many people stop stretching their brains as they age.