Impaired vision is common in old age and even more so in Alzheimer’s disease, and this results not only from damage in the association areas of the brain but also from problems in lower-level areas. A major factor in whether visual impairment impacts everyday function is contrast sensitivity.
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To use note-taking effectively, you need to understand that its primary value is not in the record you produce, it is in the process itself. The process of taking notes guides the memory codes you make. Note-taking is a strategy for making information meaningful. It is therefore only effective to the extent that you paraphrase, organize and make sense of the information while taking notes.
Let’s talk about the cognitive benefits of learning and using another language.
In a recent news report, I talked about the finding that intensive learning of a very novel language significantly grew several brain regions, of which two were positively associated with language proficiency. These regions were the right hippocampus and the left superior temporal gyrus. Growth of the first of these probably reflects the learning of a great many new words, and the second may reflect heavy use of the phonological loop (a part of working memory).
I recently reported on a finding that memories are stronger when the pattern of brain activity is more closely matched on each repetition, a finding that might appear to challenge the long-standing belief that it’s better to learn in different contexts. Because these two theories are very important for effective learning and remembering, I want to talk more about this question of encoding variability, and how both theories can be true.
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:
A number of countries have national curricula: France, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom. Most States in the U.S. follow common guidelines for a core curriculum, although there is no national curriculum as such.
What is neurogenesis?
Neurogenesis — the creation of new brain cells — occurs of course at a great rate in the very young. For a long time, it was not thought to occur in adult brains — once you were grown, it was thought, all you could do was watch your brain cells die!
Adult neurogenesis (the creation of new brain cells in adult brains) was first discovered in 1965, but only recently has it been accepted as a general phenomenon that occurs in many species, including humans (1998).
Does emotion help us remember? That's not an easy question to answer, which is unsurprising when you consider the complexities of emotion.
First of all, there are two, quite different, elements to this question. The first concerns the emotional content of the information you want to remember. The second concerns the effect of your emotional state on your learning and remembering.
The effect of emotional content
It does seem clear that, as a general rule, we remember emotionally charged events better than boring ones.
In a 1987 experiment (1), readers were presented with a text that included one or other of these sentences:
or
Both texts went on to say:
What is it?
Frontotemporal dementia is a disorder of the frontal lobes and includes what was known as primary progressive aphasia. Although it occurs far less often than Alzheimer's disease, among dementia sufferers younger than 65 it is estimated to occur at about the same rate. In other words, frontotemporal dementia is, unlike the most common dementias, not a disorder of age. Most sufferers become symptomatic in their 50s and 60s.