Dementia is estimated1 to afflict over 35.5 million people worldwide -- this includes nearly 10 million people in Europe, nearly 4.4 million in North America, nearly 7 million in South and Southeast Asia, about 5.5 million in China and East Asia and about 3 million in Latin America.
At the same time as a group of French parents and teachers have called for a two-week boycott of homework (despite the fact that homework is officially banned in French primary schools), and just after the British government scrapped homework guidelines, a large long-running British study came out in support of homework.
Although I’m a cognitive psychologist and consequently think that memory and cognition is mostly about your mastery of effective strategies, when it comes to age-related cognitive decline, I’m a big believer in the importance of diet and exercise. But while we know these things can play an important role in why some people develop cognitive impairment and even dementia as they age, and others don’t, we don’t yet know with any great certainty exactly what exercise programs would be the best use of our time, and what diet would have the most benefit.
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.
We can dramatically improve our memory for names simply by:
Transfer refers to the ability to extend (transfer) learning from one situation to another. For example, knowing how to play the piano doesn’t (I assume) help you play the tuba, but presumably is a great help if you decide to take up the harpsichord or organ. Similarly, I’ve found my knowledge of Latin and French a great help in learning Spanish, but no help at all in learning Japanese.
Learning a new language is made considerably more difficult if that language is written in an unfamiliar script. For some, indeed, that proves too massive a hurdle, and they give up the attempt.
Lewy Body Dementia is so called because the brains of affected people develop abnormal spherical masses of protein, called Lewy bodies, inside nerve cells. Lewy bodies are associated with Parkinson’s disease as well as dementia. Thus Lewy body dementia can refer to both Parkinson’s disease dementia and “dementia with Lewy bodies”. Lewy bodies are also often found in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease.
Unlike Alzheimer’s, however, dementia with Lewy bodies characteristically (but not invariably) begins with visual hallucinations.
On my walk today, I listened to a downloaded interview from the On Being website. The interview was with ‘vocal magician and conductor’ Bobby McFerrin, and something he said early on in the interview really caught my attention.
The evidence that diet, physical exercise, and mental stimulation all help prevent age-related cognitive decline and reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s, is now very convincing.
Studies of mice and (rather intriguingly) beagles, have provided evidence that ‘enriched’ environments — ones that provide opportunities for regular exercise and mental stimulation — reduce or prevent age-related cognitive decline, and reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s.
Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right?
Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of academic research have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence and its importance, even if they still haven’t got it all totally sorted yet. Today I want to talk about one particular aspect: how important intelligence is in academic success.