When it comes to EPPP preparation, sometimes there can be great comfort listening to a success story from someone who has been exactly where you are now.
Dr. Elizabeth Soliday, a former EPPP candidate herself, joins the Taylor Study Method to retell her experience with the EPPP Exam, and exactly what she did that enabled her to succeed when she sat her EPPP test.
For more info. on the EPPP Exam, and EPPP preparation go to www.taylorstudymethod.com/eppp
The phenomenon of “fire together wire together” lies at the root of some of the memory theories we have seamlessly embedded within the TSM learning process.
One of these memory theories is Mnemonics, where information you are trying to remember gets paired with rhymes, phrases, acronyms or rules. This helps to embed the information in your memory because of the neurological power of associations.
The basic process was explained in a helpful article I came across not too long ago titled ‘Making a Memory: The Power of Association, Imagery and Linking in the Brain’:
As your prepare to pass your EPPP test through the TSM study process, you will take roughly 4000 questions throughout the course of your studies. There’s a reason we make sure you answer this many questions before ever taking your EPPP test and it has to do with what I’ve been sharing about the brain.
Tests are normally associated with stress and anxiety. The very thought of taking a test is often enough to evoke negative memories from your school days, or to invoke stressful memories from your more recent time in graduate school.
In neurological terms, we might say that the idea of test-taking fires up the anxiety feeling in the cingulate gyrus, located deep inside the brain’s cortex. When the former fires up, the later fires up: test-taking and anxiety have become “wired” together in the brain. Continue reading
In EPPP Prep, and in analyzing the neurological processes involved in unhealthy emotions and pathologies, it is always tempting to start thinking we are determined by our brains. But one of the fascinating things about the science of neuro-plasticity is that it shows that there is a reciprocity between how our brains operate and the choices we make. Nowhere is this more true than when it comes to treating OCD. And understanding this will prove helpful in your EPPP prep. Continue reading
A key concern for those involved in EPPP preparation is staying mentally sharp. That is why we have been running series of articles on brain fitness. Our previous post, ‘Michael Merzenich and Brain Fitness’, introduced the ground-breaking work of neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, a pioneer in the field of brain fitness.
Merzenich was part of the team that received grants to develop Posit Science Corporation. The corporation uses plasticity-based science to research and develop exercises that increase cognitive functioning. Their exercises are available through their website, Posit Science, which is essentially a brain fitness gym that subscribers can access for $10 a month.
I don’t get any money for recommending this resource, but do so out of pure enthusiasm for Merzenich’s work. One of the reasons I’m so enthusiastic about it is because it has been proved to slow down, and sometimes even to reverse, the mental degeneration that often accompanies aging. In an article on the PositScience website titled ‘The Brain: Changing the adult mind through the power of plasticity’, Theresa Boyle explained about this degeneration process:
“Research by Dr. Timothy Salthouse at the University of Virginia shows that by about age 22 our ability to make rapid comparisons, remember unrelated information and detect relationships are at their maximum. Speed of thought and spatial visualization also peak around this age. Reasoning peaks a little later, at about age 28, and then typically declines, as do the other skills.”
What we now know is that this decline is not inevitable and can be averted by treating the brain like a muscle: the more you train it, the stronger it will become.
This has enormous for those studying to sit the EPPP and dovetails with observations we made in our previous post ‘Be Careful How You Train Your Brain.’
Further Reading
The next piece of advice we have to maximize efficiency when studying online is not to let yourself get too tired.
This is something that should be incorporated into any study routine, whether you are studying online or not, since the health of your mind goes hand in hand with the health of your body. However, this is particularly important for students who use the internet as their primary learning vehicle. The reason is simple: a tired student is likely to find it harder to resist the internet’s propensity to distract. A tired student studying online is more likely to start texting, opening up social media, watching videos on Youtube, and allowing his or her working memory to be flooded with stimuli.
If you are typical, when you’re studying you may suddenly remember something you want to check on Google, or an email you need to reply to, or something you want to say in an online discussion. It can be tempting to act on thatimpulse right away, especially if you think, “This will only take a minute, and if I do it now then at least I won’t forget.”
We suggest that instead of letting yourself be subject to the tyranny of the urgent—and often the not so urgent—that you keep a list of all the things you want to do online and then attend to those things later when you’re not studying. So if there is a webpage you want to look at, an email or text message you need to reply to, or a video on Youtube you think it would be fun to watch, simply jot it down on your list and return to it later, even if it has to wait a few days.
When we have a plan for something—even if it’s as simple as a things-to-do-list—then those things are less likely to flood our working memory. We can temporarily shelve the things on our list—clearing space in our working memory in the process—and know that we’re still in control. As you do this, you will be resisting the temptation to let yourself be inundated with information of immediate interest but which will have little or no relevance next year, or even next week.
Again, don’t just take my word for it, because there is a growing body of research to back this up. Here’s what the website Psyblog has this to say about the importance of avoiding interruptions as well as making plans:
In a series of studies researchers found that while trying to enjoy reading a novel (amongst other tasks), participants were frequently interrupted by intrusive thoughts about an unfinished everyday task.
But when researchers told participants to make very specific plans about that unfinished goal, while reading they experienced less intrusive thoughts about the other activity. In fact the intrusive thoughts lessened to the same level as a control group. This finding was repeated in the lab with other activities.
Making plans helps free up mental space for whatever we are doing right now, allowing us to be more efficient in the long term.
We have been talking a lot about ways to limit the distracting influences of the internet in general, and social networking in particular. It would be a mistake to conclude from our discussion that we think these technologies are bad, or even that they can’t be of valuable assistance as you prepare for your EPPP and afterwards in your career as a psychologist. Indeed, we have commented before that we encourage you to creatively use some of these things to your advantage rather than treating them as taboo.
“Executive control”, Sian Beilock wrote in Psychology Today, “is an umbrella term that refers to a collection of cognitive functions—such as attention, planning, memory, initiating actions and inhibiting them. When our impulses get the best of us, a failure in executive control is often to blame.”
One way to keep our executive control sharp is to limit those things within our work environment that are likely to cause distractions for us. Thus, what we said in the previous posts about email applies equally to all social networking sites and media.
Let’s get specific. When you’re studying online for your EPPP, your Facebook page should not be open in another tab, and any other social networking media should also be turned off. This includes services like Skype which operate in the background but change color when someone is trying to contact you.
If what you are studying doesn’t require a live internet connection, then you should disconnect from the internet completely. If you do this, you may find that the ‘off’ button is the most important button in your entire study experience.
In his book The Overflowing Brain: Information Overload and the Limits of Working Memory, Torkel Klingberg cites a survey of workplaces in the United States which “found that the personnel were interrupted and distracted roughly every three minutes and that people working on a computer had on average eight windows open at the same time.” If this parallels your experience as a student, you could be unnecessarily compromising your executive control and vastly underperforming as a consequence.
If you are skeptical that we are over-emphasizing this point, try this test. Every hour you are studying, keep track of how often you use the internet on things not related to your study, even if it’s something as simple as checking your email.
Remember, every time we click a button, it represents a small break in your concentration and thus a decrease in our executive control.
Again, the issue isn’t time. It takes very little time to read a Facebook update or a Twitter message. The issue is your working memory and executive control. Every time we turn our attention, however briefly, to social networking, we are adding new stimuli into our working memory. This stimuli continues to the background of our working memory even when we have returned to the previous activity, slowing down crucial cognitive processing skills in the process.
But that’s not the only reason we should avoid letting our concentration be broken when studying. An equally important factor is that you don’t want to inadvertently train your brain to find sustained concentration difficult. Given the neuroplasticity of the brain, the more you exercise part of it, the stronger that part will become. Consequently, if we are checking Facebook or Twitter updates multiple times every hour, responding to text messages as soon as they arrive, and letting the internet function for us as an ecosystem of interruption technologies, then we are training ourselves to follow interruptions, to be distracted by small and trivial changes in our environment. We are training our brains to prioritize what Tyler Cowen has called “the short, the sweet, and the bitty.”
Internet multitaskers often pride themselves on their ability to juggle many different tasks simultaneously, supposing it to be a sign of efficiency. The irony is that it is actually a sign of inefficiency. Let me end this post by sharing the insightful words of Small and Vorgan from iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind:
“Though we think we can get more done when we divide our attention and multitask, we are not necessarily more efficient. Studies show that when our brains switch back and forth from one task to another, our neural circuits take a small break in between. This is a time-consuming process that reduces efficiency. It’s not unlike closing down one computer program and booting up another—it takes a few moments to shut down and start up. With each attention shift, the frontal lobe executive centers must activate different neural circuits…. Psychologist David Meyer and colleagues at the University of Michigan studied brain efficiency when volunteers quickly switch their mental workouts from identifying hsapes to solving math problems. Both tasks take longer, and mental accuracy declines, when the volunteers are required to make attention shifts, compared with when they focus on only one task for an extended period. Switching back and forth between the two tasks, like answering email while writing a memo, may decrease brain efficiency by as much as 50 percent, compared with separately completing one task before staring another one.”
Further Reading