Articles

I’ve recently had a couple of thoughts about flow — that mental state when you lose all sense of time and whatever you’re doing (work, sport, art, whatever) seems to flow with almost magical ease. I’ve mentioned flow a couple of times more or less in passing, but today I want to have a deeper look, because learning (and perhaps especially that rewiring I was talking about in my last post) is most easily achieved if we can achieve "flow" (also known as being ‘in the zone’).

Let’s start with some background.

In general, the weight of the research evidence suggests that college students tend to have a poor sense of how prepared they are for testing, and having been tested, they have a poor sense of how well they did! (This, of course, is even more true of younger students).

Does it matter?

Find out about the pegword mnemonic

To celebrate Māori Language Week here in Aotearoa (New Zealand), I've put together a pegword set in te reo:

1. tahi — ahi
2. rua — ua
3. toru — tūru
4. whā — taniwha
5. rima — rama
6. ono — hono
7. whitu — whatu
8. waru — karu
9. iwa — taraiwa
10. tekau — rākau

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.

Children learn. It’s what they do. And they build themselves over the years from wide-eyed baby to a person that walks and talks and can maybe fix your computer, so it’s no wonder that we have this idea that learning comes so much more easily to them than it does to us. But is it true?

There are two particular areas where children are said to excel: learning language, and learning skills.

We forget someone’s name, and our response might be: “Oh I’ve always been terrible at remembering names!” Or: “I’m getting old; I really can’t remember things anymore.” Or: nothing — we shrug it off without thought. What our response might be depends on our age and our personality, but that response has nothing to do with the reason we forgot.

The thing to remember about Ericsson’s famous expertise research, showing us the vital importance of deliberate practice in making an expert, is that it was challenging the long-dominant view that natural-born talent is all-important. But Gladwell’s popularizing of Ericsson’s “10,000 hours” overstates the case, and of course people are only too keen to believe that any height is achievable if you just work hard enough.

The much more believable story is that, yes, practice is vital — a great deal of the right sort of practice — but we can’t disavow “natural” abilities entirely.

There are two well-established strategies for remembering people’s names. The simplest basically involves paying attention. Most of the time our memory for someone’s name fails because we never created an effective memory code for it.

An easy strategy for improving your memory for names

We can dramatically improve our memory for names simply by:

Consider our facts about blood:

• arteries are thick and elastic and carry blood that is rich in oxygen from the heart.
• veins are thinner, less elastic, and carry blood rich in carbon dioxide back to the heart.

We could, as is often advised, simply turn these into why questions. And we can answer these on the basis of the connections we’ve already made:

Why are arteries elastic?

Because they need to accommodate changes in pressure

Why are arteries thick?

Because they need to accommodate high pressure

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