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Stimulating activities

A 5-year study¹ involving 488 people age 75 to 85 found that, for the 101 people who developed dementia, the greater the number of stimulating activities (reading, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing board or card games, having group discussions, and playing music) they engaged in, the longer rapid memory loss was delayed. Similarly, a study² involving 1321 randomly selected people aged 70 to 89, of whom 197 had mild cognitive impairment, has found that reading books, playing games, participating in compute

Except in the cases of stroke or traumatic brain injury, loss of cognitive function is not something that happens all at once. Cognitive impairment that comes with age may be thought of as belonging on a continuum, with one end being no cognitive impairment and the other end being dementia, of which Alzheimer's is the most common type.

As we all know, rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here's a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.

Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain. However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.

I was listening on my walk today to an interview with Edward Tufte, the celebrated guru of data visualization. He said something I took particular note of, concerning the benefits of concentrating on what you’re seeing, without any other distractions, external or internal. He spoke of his experience of being out walking one day with a friend, in a natural environment, and what it was like to just sit down for some minutes, not talking, in a very quiet place, just looking at the scene.

To use a strategy effectively, you need to understand why it works, how it works, when it works and when it doesn’t.

For example, all students take notes — not everyone knows how to do it well. Research into the effectiveness of note-taking has found — surprise, surprise — that sometimes note-taking helps you remember information, and sometimes it doesn’t₁.

Difficulty in remembering people’s names is one of the most common memory tasks that people wish to be better at. And the reason for this is not that their memory is poor, but because it is so embarrassing when their memory lets them down.

This isn’t just an issue at a personal level. It’s a particular issue for anyone who has to deal with a lot of people, many of whom they will see at infrequent intervals. Nothing makes a person — a client, a customer, a student — feel more valued than being remembered.

This is the last part in my series on understanding scientific text. In this part, as promised, I am going to talk about the difficulties novices have with scientific texts; what they or their teachers can do about it; and the problems with introductory textbooks.

I don’t often talk about motor or skill memory — that is, the memory we use when we type or drive a car or play the piano. It’s one of the more mysterious domains of memory. We all know, of course, that this is a particularly durable kind of memory. It’s like riding a bicycle, we say — meaning that it’s something we’re not likely to have forgotten, something that will come back to us very readily, even if it’s been a very long time since we last used the skill.

If you have a numbered list to memorize, the best mnemonic strategy is the pegword mnemonic. This mnemonic uses numbers which have been transformed into visual images. Here's the standard 1-10 set.

I add two more:

Flashcards are cards with a word (or phrase) on one side and its translation on the other. You can buy ready-made flashcards, and these can certainly be helpful, particularly if you're inexperienced at learning another language. However, it is more effective if you make them yourself. Not only will the cards be customized to your own use, but the activity of selecting words and writing them down help you learn them.