Traumatic brain injury is the biggest killer of young adults and children in the U.S., and in a year more Americans suffer a TBI than are diagnosed with breast, lung, prostate, brain and colon cancer combined. There are many causes of TBI, but one of the more preventable is that of sports concussion.
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.
I recently read an interesting article in the Smithsonian about procrastination and why it’s good for you. Frank Partnoy, author of a new book on the subject, pointed out that procrastination only began to be regarded as a bad thing by the Puritans — earlier (among the Greeks and Romans, for example), it was regarded more as a sign of wisdom.
There are many memory strategies that can be effective in improving your recall of text. However, recent research shows that it is simplistic to think that you can improve your remembering by applying any of these strategies to any text. Different strategies are effective with different types of text.
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.
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.
Most cognitive processes decline with age
It does appear that most component processes of cognition decline with advanced age if the difficulty level is sufficiently high. For example, the following processes have all shown age effects:
Subliminal learning achieved notoriety back in 1957, when James Vicary claimed moviegoers could be induced to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola through the use of messages that flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen. The claim was later shown to be false, but though the idea that people can be brainwashed by the use of such techniques has been disproven (there was quite a bit of hysteria about the notion at the time), that doesn’t mean the idea of subliminal learning is crazy.
This post is the fourth and last part in a four-part series on how education delivery is changing, and the set of literacies required in today’s world. Part 1 looked at textbooks; Part 2 at direct instruction/lecturing; Part 3 at computer learning.. This post looks at learning models and types of literacy.
Literacy. What does it mean?
Genes
Several genes have been implicated in Alzheimer's, but the big one is the e4 allele of the ApoE gene (on chromosome 19). This variant is found in about a quarter of the population.
Having it doesn't mean you are foreordained to develop Alzheimer's, but it certainly increases the risk substantially. The risk goes up considerably more if both of your genes are the e4 variant (remember you inherit two: one from each parent).