Training Working Memory Can Be Fun

Biological reward comes from the release of the neurotransmitter,dopamine. Dopamine release is promoted by performing working memory tasks, which suggests that working memory tasks are actually rewarding. In the study of human subjects by Fiona McNab and colleagues in Stockholm, human males (age 20-28) were trained for 35 minutes per day for five weeks on working memory tasks with a difficulty level close to their individual capacity limit. After such training, all subjects showed increased working memory capacity. Functional MRI scans also showed that the memory training increased the cerebral cortex density of dopamine D1 receptors, the receptor subtype that mediates feelings of euphoria and reward.

Some games that are fun to play may also help working memory. The most obvious example is chess. To play chess well, you have to learn to expand working memory capacity to hold a plan for several offensive moves while at the same time holding a memory of how the opponent could respond to each of the moves. Not surprisingly there are studies showing that IQ scores can go up after several months of chess playing. Some schools, especially in minority schools in impoverished neighborhoods have seen marked improvements in school work by students who joined school chess clubs.

Students who make good grades feel good about their success. Likewise, people who are "life-long learners" have discovered learning lots of new things makes them feel good.

Make your working memory work for you

Training Working Memory: Why and How

Working memory refers to the memory you can consciously hold in your mind at any one instant—such as a phone number you just looked up. Most people can only hold about four totally independent items in their working memory.

Working memory relates to intelligence. The reason is that thinking involves streaming into the brain's "thought engine" chunks of information held in working memory. The working memory streams in, much like a Web video streams into your computer. The more you can hold in working memory, the more information the brain has to think with—that is, the smarter it can be.

IQ is not fixed. It improves dramatically in the early school years in all children. Moreover, a recent study shows that both verbal and non-verbal IQ can change (for better or worse) in teenagers.

Educators have known for some time that it is possible to train ADHDchildren to have better working memories, and in the process improve their school performance. The idea that working memory capacity might be expanded by training normal children has not yet caught on. Test-driven teaching in U.S. schools teaches students what to learn, not how to learn.

Researchers in Japan recently tested whether a simple working memory training method could increase the working memory capacity of children. While they were at it, they tested for any effect on IQ. Children ages 6-8 were trained 10 minutes a day each day for two months. The training task to expand working memory capacity consisted of presenting a digit or a word item for a second, with one-second intervals between items. For example, a sequence might be 5, 8, 4, 7, with one-second intervals between each digit. Test for recall could take the form of "Where in the sequence was the 4?" or "What was the 3rd item?" Thus students had to practice holding the item sequence in working memory. With practice, the trainers increased the number of items from 3 to 8.

After training, researchers tested the children on another working memory task. Scores on this test indicated in all children that working memory correlated with IQ test scores. When first graders were tested forintelligence, the data showed that intelligence scores increased during the year by 6% in controls, but increased by 9% in the group that had been given the memory training. The memory training effect was even more evident in the second graders, with a 12% gain in intelligence score in the memory trained group, compared with a 6% gain in controls. As might be expected, the lower IQ children showed the greatest gain from memory training.

I recently found a paper revealing lasting improvements in brain function were produced in healthy adults by only five weeks of practice on three working-memory tasks involving the location of objects in space, using a training program called CogMed. Similar results have been reported by other investigators.

Another study provides strong evidence that increasing adult working memory capacity will raise their IQ. Subjects, young adults were trained on a so-called dual N-back test in which subjects were asked to recall a visual stimulus that they saw two, three or more stimulus presentations in the past. As performance improved with each block of trials, the task demands were increased by shifting from two-back to three, then three to four, etc. Daily training took about 25 minutes.

The investigators found working memory training improved scores on the IQ test. Moreover, the effect was dose-dependent, in that intelligence scores increased in a steady straight-line fashion as the number of training sessions increased from 8 to 12 to 17 to 19.

Advances in this arena of raising IQ in teenagers and adults may come faster now that we have some many published reports that working memory capacity can indeed be expanded by training. The trick is in finding which approaches work best. Currently, we believe that working memory can be expanded by attentiveness training, music, and certain game environments. Actually, I believe demanding education can do the same thing.

Various techniques are reported in the research literature, and the best results seem to come from n-back methods. One study by Verhaeghen and colleagues show that memory span could be increased from one to four steps back with 10 hours (1 hr/session) of N-back training.

A whole cognitive enhancement industry is flourishing. The idea of brain fitness software is that playing mentally challenging games will make you smarter. This is not necessarily true. Several recent reviews suggest that such games do little. I can only recommend with some certainty those games that focus on expanding working memory capacity, and even here, one should not expect too much. I know about three such programs, MindSparke, Cogmed, and Jungle Memory. I have no personal experience or financial interest in any of these, but each has the potential to be helpful, especially in kids or adults with attention deficit.

Memory

mem·o·ry  (mm-r)

n. pl. mem·o·ries

1. The mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience.

2. The act or an instance of remembering; recollection: spent the afternoon lost in memory.

3. All that a person can remember: It hasn't happened in my memory.

4. Something remembered: pleasant childhood memories.

5. The fact of being remembered; remembrance: dedicated to their parents' memory.

6. The period of time covered by the remembrance or recollection of a person or group of persons: within the memory of humankind.

7. Biology Persistent modification of behavior resulting from an animal's experience.

8. Computer Science

a. A unit of a computer that preserves data for retrieval.

b. Capacity for storing information: two gigabytes of memory.

9. Statistics The set of past events affecting a given event in a stochastic process.

10. The capacity of a material, such as plastic or metal, to return to a previous shape after deformation.

11. Immunology The ability of the immune system to respond faster and more powerfully to subsequent exposure to an antigen.

How to Improve Your Memory

How to Improve Your Memory
Tips and Exercises to Sharpen Your Mind and Boost Brainpower

A strong memory depends on the health and vitality of your brain. Whether you're a student studying for final exams, a working professional interested in doing all you can to stay mentally sharp, or a senior looking to preserve and enhance your grey matter as you age, there are lots of things you can do to improve your memory and mental performance.

Harnessing the power of your brain
They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but when it comes to the brain, scientists have discovered that this old adage simply isn’t true. The human brain has an astonishing ability to adapt and change—even into old age. This ability is known as neuroplasticity. With the right stimulation, your brain can form new neural pathways, alter existing connections, and adapt and react in ever-changing ways.

The brain’s incredible ability to reshape itself holds true when it comes to learning and memory. You can harness the natural power of neuroplasticity to increase your cognitive abilities, enhance your ability to learn new information, and improve your memory.

Improving memory tip 1: Don't skimp on exercise or sleep

Just as an athlete relies on sleep and a nutrition-packed diet to perform his or her best, your ability to remember increases when you nurture your brain with a good diet and other healthy habits.

Can a memory be forgotten and then remembered? Can a 'memory' be suggested and then remembered as true?

These questions lie at the heart of the memory of childhood abuse issue. Experts in the field of memory and trauma can providesome answers, but clearly more study and research are needed. What we do know is that both memory researchers and clinicians who work with trauma victims agree that both phenomena occur. However, experienced clinical psychologists state that the phenomenon of a recovered memory is rare (e.g., one experienced practitioner reported having a recovered memory arise only once in 20 years of practice). Also, although laboratory studies have shown that memory is often inaccurate and can be influenced by outside factors, memory research usually takes place either in a laboratory or some everyday setting. For ethical and humanitarian reasons, memory researchers do not subject people to a traumatic event in order to test their memory of it. Because the issue has not been directly studied, we can not know whether a memory of a traumatic event is encoded and stored differently from a memory of a nontraumatic event.

Some clinicians theorize that children understand and respond to trauma differently from adults. Some furthermore believe that childhood trauma may lead to problems in memory storage and retrieval. These clinicians believe that dissociation is a likely explanation for a memory that was forgotten and later recalled. Dissociation means that a memory is not actually lost, but is for some time unavailable for retrieval. That is, it's in memory storage, but cannot for some period of time actually be recalled. Some clinicians believe that severe forms of child sexual abuse are especially conducive to negative disturbances of memory such as dissociation or delayed memory. Many clinicians who work with trauma victims believe that this dissociation is aperson's way of sheltering himself or herself from the pain of the memory. Many researchers argue, however, that there is little or no empirical support for such a theory.

“The grass is always greener where you water it.” ~Unknown

I’ve had this theory about life for a while now, ever since I embraced simplicity three years ago.

Life, a good life, a life well lived, is about maintenance. It isn’t chance or luck or fate (though I believe in those things, and in magic too); it’s about doing the work to create the life you want, and doing it over and over and over again.

Not that long ago, my writing life resembled un-watered grass. I let the passion I have for writing and words get away from me in my quest for an adult life. I begrudged anyone who had ever done anything creative—they must have more time, more money, more luck, the right connections, or something, anything, I didn’t have.

All my unused creativity turned into bitterness. I’m not one for jealousy or envy, because I know the value of living a happy, grateful life.

Still, all that unused creativity made me feel like I had no purpose in life—looking around I saw dried up, brown grass. What I should have been tending to, lay fallow and ignored.

By mere chance, I picked up a book on simple living at the library. It was spring, and while everything came to life around me, I felt—well, in retrospect, I think I felt nothing. A sort of apathy had taken over. Sitting on the back steps of my patio, flipping through that book, something clicked.

For me, simplicity and creativity go hand in hand. I spent over a year simplifying my life—decluttering, meditating, and becoming very purposeful about what I wanted and needed, and how those two things are different.

Then, one day, I sat down and started writing. Writing so much, in fact, that I finished the first draft of a novel.

Writing (and all creativity) needs space. It needs intention and purpose. Like grass, it needs to be watered, and how can you water it if you’re so busy attending to all the other “things” in your life?

Finding your simplicity edge can take some time and energy. There will be lots of sorting and deciding and donating and throwing away. Making space—physical space—can make a huge difference in your life; it is worth every minute decluttering.

And you deal with all your “stuff”, there is the mental and emotional stuff to be dealt with too: Is your calendar jam-packed because you hate to say no? Are you working a job you dislike to pay the bills you’ve accrued from all those purchases?

Here are 10 tips to find the time, energy, and space for your creative life (essentially, how to water your grass):

1. Say no.

To invitations and purchases, to guilt about disappointing others and items you don’t need. We all have our weaknesses—mine is shoes, my partner’s is helping people—but learning to say no, is really the first step in simplifying your way back to creativity. It isn’t selfish to honor your creative self; it’s self-care.

2. Have fun.

Creativity is about creation, and creation is fun. It should be enjoyable. If it doesn’t appeal to you, don’t force yourself to do it—because “should” is very different than “want.”

3. Keep the editor away.

The editor has her place in creative “work”—like when I write book reviews or polish stories for publication—but she has no place in the creative sphere. Figure out a way to keep her busy or send her packing, and only call on her when her not-picky voice might actually be useful.

4. Be curious.

Embrace your curiosity as a natural state. Curiosity is key. Without it, creativity can’t thrive.

5. Expect and embrace imperfection.

Perfection is creativity’s enemy.

6.  Toot your horn.

I’m terrible at this but I’m learning. People love to talk about creative endeavors—and it is inspiring to see how and what others are doing. Don’t be afraid to say, Hey, I painted that or Hey, I wrote a poem.

7. But don’t compare.

The grass is not greener anywhere else. You’re just looking at it from a different angle, and perception can be deceiving.

8. Keep it simple.

Don’t run out and buy anything you think you need to be creative. Creativity isn’t about items—though you may need brushes or a pencil or paper—it’s about the act. Start small, start with what you have.

9. Allow space and time.

Creativity really only needs space and time, two of the hardest gifts to give yourself. Clear a corner in your home, forgo a night out with friends, and begin.

10. Make it a routine.

This might sound anathema to creativity—it’s all about inspiration right?—but it’s actually the key. The grass doesn’t get green from the occasional heavy watering. It gets green from regular tending.

Creativity is the same: Attend to it everyday—the results are worth the effort.

By Sara Rauch

when u remember past memories ...then take a breath nd say ...."huh , wish it would come back again..

Special Memories of Life Services

Memories are a way in which to immortalize those we cherish in life in their death. Our memories of our loved ones keep them in our lives, and their influence stays with us always. When we are blessed with special events such as weddings, anniversaries, or the birth of children, we naturally seek ways to keep these Special Memories close to our hearts forever.

Special Memories of Life represents a unique approach to arranging and providing services and products to help families capture, share and preserve their memories of a loved one.   We believe that this is one of the most significant and helpful things we can do at the time of your loss.  It is our responsibility to assist you in commemorating a life lived.

We encourage you to feel free to ask your specially trained and licensed funeral director to assist you in capturing your Special Memories of Life.