EPPP Preparation Program Points to Future of Online Education

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To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web, Graham Taylor joined me for an exclusive interview. I talked to Dr. Taylor about the way the internet has changed how we view education, advertising and life in general.

 

Graham Taylor spoke with Robin Phillips about how the internet has changed our view of education, advertising and life in general.

Robin Phillips: Thank you for joining us on this special day. Perhaps you could explain to us the significance of this day.

Graham Taylor: It’s a pleasure to talk with you today Robin. The reason this day is important is because it is the 25th anniversary of the World Wide Web. It was 25 years ago today that Sir Tim Berners-Lee was credited for inventing the internet through a proposal on how to improve the flow between links.

So many changes have happened since that day 25 years ago. This has prompted a lot of self-reflection in the papers about how the internet has changed our lives. What I’m particularly interested in is how the internet has permanently altered education. Continue reading →

Training the Aging Brain in Your EPPP Preparation

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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.

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The Opportunities of Being Elderly

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In his book The Mature Mind: The Positive Power of the Aging Brain, Gene Cohen identified many areas where the brain of elderly people has an advantage over the brains of younger people.

For example, Cohen shows that as we age our brains become more flexible. (This happens because of a greater connection between the left and right hemispheres of our brains.) One of the results of this is that the older we become the easier it is to resolve apparent contradictions in opposing and seemingly incompatible views. Elderly people also find it easier to grasp the ‘big picture’, seeing the forest instead of just the trees. Continue reading →

Positive Bias Towards Aging Can Help at EPPP

Posted on in Psychology News by Graham TaylorLeave a Comment
Elderly people can succeed at the EPPP just as younger people can.

In my previous post, ‘Leverage Your Age When Studying for the EPPP’ and ‘Speech and Elderly Self-Perception’, I mentioned about the self-fulfilling nature of what we think about aging. Building on this, I was interested to find that a report published in The Journal of the American Medical Association showed that seniors with a positive bias about growing old were 44% more likely to fully recover from a bout of disability than those that accepted negative stereotypes about age.

Now that’s amazing. And the basic principle no doubt extends wider than simply the issue of disability. The point is that our expectations about ourselves affect the types of things we can do and even the type of people we become. Continue reading →

Speech and Elderly Self-Perception

Posted on in Brain and memory, Psychology by Graham TaylorLeave a Comment

In the mid-1990s Becca Levy began a series of experiments to show the importance of how we think about aging.

Levy, who was an associate professor of epidemiology and psychology at Yale University at the time, later published her findings in a 2002 edition of The Journal of Personal and Social Psychology.

Her research involved exposing elderly people to subliminal messages about aging and then asking them to perform a task. Those who had been exposed to negative words such as “decrepit” were found to walk slower, have poorer handwriting, and other behaviors associated with negative stereotypes of aging. On the other hand, those who were first primed with positive words about aging (like ‘wisdom’) performed better. Continue reading →

Leverage Your Age When Studying for the EPPP

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Gene Cohen

Our culture tells us that growing old, and even the mid-life years, are associated with cognitive decline. For many, words such as “decrepit”, “decline” and “senility” are practically synonymous with old age. In hundreds of different ways, we are basically told that growing older equals getting dumber.

These assumptions about mid-life and old age often have a self-fulfilling quality about them. This is because these assumptions unconsciously effect how we self-identify as we age. Consequently, as we get older we tend to cease putting ourselves in situations where we will be mentally stretched because we assume we can’t handle it. As a result, we cease having opportunities to earn the type of confidence that is a precondition to success. Continue reading →

Earning Your Confidence As You Grow Old

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Positive thinking plays an important role in our self-perception as we age. In fact, research shows that we often become the people we expect ourselves to be.

Now it’s important to understand that when I talk about the power of positive thinking, I don’t mean a simply “Believe in yourself and you’ll succeed.” As I explained in my earlier post about confidence, a person can spend all day imagining that he is a successful NFL quarterback, but if he doesn’t actually train, he’ll be lucky if he can even throw a complete pass. While self-belief and confidence are important for success, if our confidence isn’t earned, our self-belief can be little more than self-deception. Continue reading →

How to Create Confidence in your EPPP Preparation

Posted on in EPPP Study Tips by Graham TaylorLeave a Comment

A recurring theme on this blog has been the power of positive thinking. I have tried to emphasize that there is a reciprocal relationship between how we think of ourselves, on the one hand, and our performance outcomes, on the other.

For example, it is hard to succeed if we continually think of ourselves as a failure. On the other hand, as we act in ways that earn our own confidence, then we have a basis to expect positive outcomes, and that expectation can be then be channeled into success. Continue reading →

Soft-Wired

Posted on in Brain and memory by Graham TaylorLeave a Comment

On this blog we have had frequent occasion to refer to Dr. Michael Merzenich’s ground-breaking research on neuroplasticity and to channel his insights into the EPPP preparation materials we produce for you.

It was therefore a great delight to recently learn that Dr. Merzenich’s book Soft-Wired: How the New Science of Brain Plasticity Can Change your Life is now available in paperback and on Kindle.

In this book Dr. Merzenich explains how to take control of your brain’s evolution and utilize your own neuroplasticity in a way that will improve your life. Continue reading →

Fiction and Emotional Intelligence

Posted on in Brain and memory, Psychology News by Graham TaylorLeave a Comment

In our previous post, I shared about a study that was done in Liverpool last January. The study had found that reading authors like Shakespeare is good for the brain.

This study was echoed last October by further research that was published in Science Magazine. This research showed that reading literary fiction increases the type of emotional intelligence needed to empathize with others.

Pam Belluck summarized the study’s findings in the New York Times. Belluck reported that the study

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