Mindframe

  Reading to a toddler-aged child does more than just get them to sit still for a few minutes. Led by James Law, Professor of Speech and Language Sciences in Newcastle University’s School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences, researchers found something interesting. According to a new study, when parents and other caregivers routinely read with small children, the result is a language advantage of eight months. The researchers carefully reviewed sixteen reading intervention studies from the past 40 years, conducted in the USA, South Africa, Canada, Israel, and China. Some children were read to by a parent; some were read to by another caregiver. Some were read to from books; some were shown electronic readers. The average age of the child involved was 39 months. The goal was to examine the effects on receptive language (the ability to understand words), expressive language (the ability to translate thoughts into words), and pre-reading skills (th...

    We all want to hang out with the people who really “get” us—our equals, our peers. As it turns out, this even appears to hold true for infants. In some ways, it can be easy to know a baby’s likes and dislikes. They generally like being carried by a parent, and dislike sitting in a dirty diaper, for instance. Yet when it comes to studying some infant preferences, researchers must be very careful and creative in their methodology. You can’t exactly make a baby sit down and take a survey—they’d probably just try to eat the pencil. Recently, McGill University professor Linda Polka and her team hit upon an experiment design to test how babies reacted to various vowel sounds. The infants in question were not just pre-verbal but pre-babbling, too young to even make “ba ba ba” noises.) Five-month-olds were sat at a screen with a checkerboard pattern. By looking at or away from the checkerboard, the babies could activate or mute a sound. The result? The subjects d...

  Read this shopping list, and then cover it with your hand: Bread Milk Oranges Peanut Butter Yogurt Pickles Turkey Folders Tissue Gum Now, how many of the items can you remember without peeking? Give yourself a moment to recall as many of them as you can. (We’ll wait.) If you left out an item (or several), chances are good it wasn’t the bread or the gum, but rather something in the middle. And if that’s the case, congratulations, you have something in common with 19 th century psychologist and memory pioneer Hermann Ebbinghaus. At the time, the prevailing thought held that memory was impossible to study in any scientific fashion; it was simply too nebulous, too mysterious. Ebbinghaus disagreed. But since every single mind is different, how in the world would he eliminate confounding variables? His imperfect yet deeply elegant solution: to study only a single experimental subject—himself. To collect his data, Ebbinghaus tested his own ability t...

The concept of studying is at the core of our learning institutions. It's what you're supposed to be doing in college. Still, just how you're meant to do it remains one of the many mysteries of college; the drop out rate is about 33%. To be fair, there's a number of reasons a person might drop out of college, but for those who are looking to up their study game, here are some quick neuroscience facts to work smarter and not harder. 1. Eliminate distractions. Splitting focus with your smartphone, tablet, TV, or roommate blathering away will force your brain to "task switch", flipping back and forth and draining your brain's energy reserves. This will drastically reduce your ability to move information into your memory for later retrieval. It might feel like multitasking, but research shows that attempting multiple demanding tasks at once sets you up for the 50/50 rule. That is, you'll make 50% more mistakes and you'll take 50% longer than i...

Memory is a fickle thing. There are times when the important information you need, like an email password, remains just out of your grasp.  But you’re equally likely to recall a jingle for a product that’s been obsolete for decades, a product you never even purchased or liked. Forgetting: the older we get, the scarier it seems, what with the threat of Alzheimer’s and dementia hovering out there like the ghosts of senility future. But what if the act of forgetting wasn’t just part of the normal degradation of memory but actually intrinsic to the act of remembering?  What if in order to remember something, you had to forget a little of it? It flies in the face of how we conceptualize memory, as stored information slowly disappearing like cookies from the cookie jar. But University of California scientists Robert and Elizabeth Bjork have helped alter our perception of how memory and learning work. In one experiment, people were given a series of poetry lines to learn...

When you hear the term "spaced learning", you might think it has to do with learning that takes place while you're "spaced out.’   But spaced learning is the less-than-catchy phrase used to describe a scientific breakthrough in memory acquisition. Learning is fundamentally about sticking something into your memory for retrieval later. During a learning episode, information first moves into your short-term memory and creates a new neural pathway. If that pathway is repeatedly stimulated, it triggers the brain to transfer the information into your long-term memory. The neural pathway acts as both conduit and code for that information upload. Therefore, repetition is key to long-term learning. This process has been well known in the scientific community for some time. But what if there was a way to speed up learning, to learn an entire history module that would normally take a month, in about an hour? In his  Scientific American article " Making Memor...

One of the most disorienting ideas in Nobel Prize winning economist Daniel Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow is just how susceptible humans are to priming. Kahneman describes an experiment by psychologist John Bargh, in which students at New York University—mostly between the ages of 18 to 22—had to arrange sets of five words into four-word sentences. Half of the students were given words with a decidedly elderly slant: Florida, bingo, arthritis, and so on. The other half were given words with no real theme. When the students were done, the experimenters measured how quickly it took them to get up and walk out the door. Without being aware of it, the students given "old person" words moved significantly slower. Creepy, right? It gets creepier. Bargh did another experiment, but this time half the group got rudeness-themed words ("abrupt") and half got politeness-themed words ("patient"). When the test was over, the student was instructed to...

Hoarders are an interesting lot.  Some contend that it’s a form of mental illness: the compulsive need to hold onto a wide variety of items—or occasionally, animals— far exceeding their possible utility. There are the classic cases, the houses reduced to a series of claustrophobic tunnels through floor-to-ceiling piles of magazines, broken televisions, commemorative lunch-boxes, and so on. And once those pathways close up with the overflow, the logical move? Rent a storage unit. The explosion of storage units across the county seems to only be rivaled by new nail salons and Starbucks. I’m not suggesting that storage units are only frequented by hoarders, but undoubtedly it does allow a hoarder a kind of unlimited opportunity to continue their calling. To the non-hoarder, this behavior seems unfathomable. Why would anyone collect so much stuff that they’re clearly never going use? I don’t pretend to answer that question. But what if the hoarders among us aren’t really out...

Have you ever wondered why some people—and maybe we’re talking about you—are so adamant about some things? It might be a political position or your thoughts on diet and exercise, music, drunk drivers, tuna fish—the list goes on. And if you were asked what informed your particular stance, answers might include your spiritual faith, personal life experience, and/or what you’ve learned from others through a wide variety of sources. Your belief system is subjective, and like your fingerprints, unique to you. As far as storage and access go, you hold the keys. But although the system is subjective, what’s less subjective is the architecture it’s built on, according to many neuroscientists. The thought is that the brain attaches emotional meaning to some events, in the form of memory markers. The outrage that accompanies your feelings of hearing about a hit-and-run drunk driver on the 10 o’clock news helps to both inform your opinion and store it in your memory for recall later. C...