Memory Improvement Techniques and Brain Exercises

By Alvaro Fernandez | October 22, 2007 |

A read­er (thanks Mike!) sends us this fun arti­cle, titled A mat­ter of train­ing, on how to train our mem­o­ry. Some quotes: “It’s a skill, not a tal­ent. It’s some­thing any­one could have picked up … I’m not born with this. It’s about train­ing and tech­nique, he says, explain­ing his unusu­al abil­i­ty. Anant holds the…

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Information Overload? Seven Learning and Productivity Tips

By Alvaro Fernandez | October 19, 2007 |

We often talk in this blog about how to expand fun­da­men­tal abil­i­ties or cog­ni­tive func­tions, like atten­tion, or mem­o­ry, or emo­tion­al self-reg­u­la­­tion. Think of them as mus­cles one can train. Now, it is also impor­tant to think of ways one can use our exist­ing mus­cles more effi­cient­ly. Let’s talk about how to man­age bet­ter the…

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Working Memory: an image that says much

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 27, 2007 |

(Graph Source: Kling­berg et al, 2005) Work­ing mem­o­ry is a key cog­ni­tive func­tion that allows you to hold sev­er­al units of infor­ma­tion in mind “online” for brief peri­ods of time, typ­i­cal­ly a few sec­onds, and man­age them. For exam­ple, if I tell you the 7 dig­its of my tele­phone num­ber, would you remem­ber them? and, could you…

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Best of the Brain from Scientific American

By Alvaro Fernandez | September 20, 2007 |

The Dana Foun­da­tion kind­ly sent us a copy of the great book Best of the Brain from Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can, a col­lec­tion of 21 superb arti­cles pub­lished pre­vi­ous­ly in Sci­en­tif­ic Amer­i­can mag­a­zine. A very nice­ly edit­ed and illus­trat­ed book, this is a must for any­one who enjoys learn­ing about the brain and spec­u­lat­ing about what the…

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