Staying healthy to stay focused

My nose is a torrent, my head is a pressure-cooker and my lymph nodes are a series of warzones.
Maybe it goes without saying, but I haven’t gotten much studying in today.
From an experiential point of view, we know that when we over-stress our body — through studying, physical exertion, emotional tumult, etc. — our body [...]

The Monotillation of Traxoline

Brad Hoge at the HUNBlog wrote a very poignant post regarding the problems that can come about through lecturing and test making; in this post he makes reference to the monotillation of traxoline: in this post he floods you with jargon from an imaginary field, then quizzes you on the same.
I’ll give you an example [...]

You can remember everything

… Almost.
More and more, just from experience and from learning about cognitive psychology, I’ve found that we can remember much more that we thought. Even seemingly lost facts, places, faces, etc. can be found.
How can we perform such amazing feats? Through associative memory. (Those of you with some psychology background may not be too surprised.) [...]

A new memory philosophy for a new year

Toward the end of last semester I’ve come across a different way of thinking about memory. It comes from an audio program from Vera Birkenbihl called Memory Optimizer.
She describes memory as construction: when you attempt to place a fact – say someone’s name – in your brain, you must first construct the idea of that [...]

Experiments in learning that don’t explode

As people make the transition from high school to university they find that many aspects of their lives and mindsets change. A newly discovered freedom – or at least awareness – causes people to reassess what they know to be true or good.
Naturally, this leads to a lot of experimentation. In university such experiments may [...]

How to Keep Mentally Active in the Summer

I find that after the summer vacation starts, there’s always this high you get once you realize that you won’t be doing homework for a long time. However, after a little while you find that your thinking is starting to slowdown, you feel mentally and physically lazy. Maybe you aren’t like this, but sometimes I’ll [...]

Priming yourself to be smarter

In my continuing fascination with how our brains work, I decided to pick up Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink (new window), after reading his earlier book, The Tipping Point (mentioned in the post: Knowledge and Relationships).
Once again I am highly recommending this book. This book is just as, perhaps more, fascinating than The Tipping Point.
To the point: [...]

Memory Tips – Pegging

Pegging can be used to remember items in a specific order or associated with certain numbers. Basically, it is where you form vivid mental associations between a preset known object (the peg) and what you want to memorize. You are putting the item you want to memorize on the peg. So if you can remember [...]