Ask your competent? doctor if this technique works for stroke recovery AND PROVIDE EXACT PROTOCOLS OF ITS' USE!
Learn faster, make better decisions, build a healthier brain: Neuroscience says try any of these 4 simple techniques
Because what you do starts with what you know–and retain.
We all want to be smarter. Make better decisions. Learn faster, and retain more of what we learn.
Easier said than done, though — unless you use one or more of these simple, research-backed techniques.
1. Test yourself
While it can be frustrating to fail, considerable research shows that frequently testing yourself as you learn, especially if you get something wrong, is an highly effective way to speed up the learning process.
At least some of the learning benefit comes form the additional context created. Imagine you’re trying to remember the five most important benefits of a new product. Test yourself, fail to remember a few, and then check your list… and not only are you more likely to remember those things the next time, but you’ll also remember that you didn’t remember those things. (I know, sounds meta. But it works.)
So don’t just read and highlight and re-read. Test yourself as you go. See if you can list the three main points you want to make. See if you can cite key statistics. Sales figures. Profit margins. You’ll gain confidence in how much you know, and you’ll more quickly learn the things you don’t remember the first time around.
2. Learn in shorter bursts
Most of us (and by most of us, I mean me) tend tend to wait until the last minute to learn what we need to know. A presentation. A pitch to investors. A new sales demo.
Waiting until the last minute doesn’t just create more stress, though; it’s also a much less effective way to learn. The better approach is to use what psychologists call “distributed practice.”
Say you want to nail a presentation. Run through it once. Take a few minutes to make a few corrections or revisions. Run through it again. Then walk away for at least a few hours, or even for a day, before you rehearse again.
Do that, and as a study published in Behavioral Science (Basel) shows, your level of retention improves dramatically. Why? Go over your presentation repeatedly and it’s still top of mind. You don’t have to retrieve it from memory. By spacing out your sessions, you you tap into the power of study-phase retrieval. Each time you try to retrieve something from memory, that memory becomes harder to forget, even if you initially struggled to retrieve it.
Spacing out your sessions also increases contextual variability. When information gets encoded into memory, some of the context is also encoded. That’s why listening to some songs can cause you to remember where you were, what you were feeling, etc., when you first heard that song. That context creates useful cues for retrieving information.
Instead of waiting until the last minute, give yourself enough time to space out your learning sessions.
Related video at link3. “Study” differently
When you want to gain expertise, how much you practice matters. But what matters even more is the way you practice.
Say you’re trying to learn a physical skill. Don’t just repeat it over and over again and hope you’ll eventually master that task. The better approach? Mix it up a little. A Johns Hopkins study found that practicing a slightly modified version of a task you want to master lets you learn more, and more quickly, than if you just keep practicing the exact same thing multiple times in a row.
That’s the power of reconsolidation, a process where existing memories are recalled and modified with new knowledge.
A simple example is trying to get better at shooting free throws. The conditions are fixed. The rim is always ten feet high. The foul line is always fiteen feet away. In theory, shooting from the same spot, over and over again, will help you ingrain the right motions into your muscle memory and improve your accuracy and consistency.
And, of course, that does happen.
But a better, faster way to improve is to slightly adjust the conditions in subsequent practice sessions.
Maybe one time you’ll stand a few inches to the left of center. Another time, a few inches to the right. Or stand slightly farther back, or forward. By making the conditions different each time, you prime your (muscle) memory reconsolidation pump, and will improve more quickly.
Just make sure you only modify the conditions slightly. Change things up too much and you’ll create brand-new memories, not reconsolidated memories; according to the researchers, the modifications need to be subtle.
And the practice sessions need to be spaced out. Researchers gave the participants a six-hour gap between training sessions, because neurological research indicates it takes that long for new memories to consolidate. If you practice slightly differently too soon after the previous session, you don’t get enough time to “internalize” what you just learned. You can’t modify old memories, and therefore improve your skills, because those memories haven’t had the chance to become old memories.
Bottom line? Don’t do the same thing over and over. Slightly modify the conditions in subsequent practice sessions and then give yourself the time to consolidate the new memories you make.
That’s the fastest path to expertise.
4. Exercise before you learn
You likely know that exercise can help you perform better under stress. That exercising for 20 minutes can elevate your mood for up to 12 hours. That exercise can even make you a better leader.
But what you likely don’t know is that exercise can help you better retain important information, and more quickly learn a new skill or technique.
Or say you want to learn or improve a task where motor skills are involved. According to a different study published in Scientific Reports, 15 minutes of cycling at 80 percent of max heart rate (“intense” exercise) resulted in better memory performance than 30 minutes of moderate exercise, which was better than no exercise at all.
Say you want to improve your ability to remember certain things. A Harvard study found that moderate intensity workouts — keeping your heart rate between 50 and 80 percent of max — dramatically improves recall and associative learning, and increases your brain’s ability to absorb and retain information.
In simple terms, exercising vigorously for 15 minutes “fired up” participants’ brains and allowed them to learn motor skills better and faster. So did 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise.
And then there’s this. Research shows exercise can increase the size of your hippocampus, even if you’re in your 60s and 70s, helping to mitigate the impact of age-related memory loss. Yep: Exercise helps make your brain healthier, too.
Which will not only help you be smarter, but also stay smarter.
This post originally appeared at inc.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment