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Texas-A&M-University

Improve Memory with Sleep, Practice, and Testing

July 9, 2008 by Dr. Bill Klemm

There are whole mar­kets (think cross­words, herbal sup­ple­ments, drugs, brain fit­ness soft­ware) aimed at help­ing us improve our memory.

Now, what is “mem­o­ry”? how does the process of mem­o­ry sleep and memorywork?

Dr. Bill Klemm, Pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­science at Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty, explains a very impor­tant con­cept below.

- Alvaro

——-

Get­ting from Here to There:
Mak­ing Mem­o­ry Con­sol­i­da­tion Work

By Bill Klemm,  Ph. D.

Until con­sol­i­da­tion has occurred, a short-term mem­o­ry is very vul­ner­a­ble, as all of us have expe­ri­enced from look­ing up a phone num­ber only to have some dis­trac­tion cause us to lose the num­ber before we can get it dialed.

What is “con­sol­i­da­tion”?

Brain researchers use the term “con­sol­i­da­tion” for the process where­by short-term mem­o­ry gets made more permanent.

Here, I would like to dis­cuss some aspects of con­sol­i­da­tion that many peo­ple may not know about: why sleep is so impor­tant, why mem­o­ry must be prac­ticed, and how test­ing pro­motes con­sol­i­da­tion. [Read more…] about Improve Mem­o­ry with Sleep, Prac­tice, and Testing

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: brain-fitness-software, brain-research, crosswords, drugs, herbal-supplements, improve-memory, Learning, long-term-memory, memory-consolidation, neuroscience, short-term-memory, testing-and-learning, Texas-A&M-University

Brain and Cognition Expert Contributors

May 5, 2008 by Alvaro Fernandez

As you have prob­a­bly noticed, a grow­ing num­ber of Expert Con­trib­u­tors are writ­ing in our blog, so that we can col­lec­tive­ly dis­cuss the lat­est research and trends on cog­ni­tive and brain health, and the impli­ca­tions of brain research in gen­er­al for our every­day lives. 

If you haven’t done so already, make sure to sub­scribe to our newslet­ter (above) and our RSS feed (on the right).

Below you have the pro­files of some of our Con­trib­u­tors and links to their best arti­cles with us so far. Enjoy!

[Read more…] about Brain and Cog­ni­tion Expert Contributors

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health, Education & Lifelong Learning Tagged With: altruism, Applied-Learning, attention-training, brain, brain-fitness-program, cognifit, cognition, Cognitive-Neurology, cognitive-psychology, compassion, Duke-University, Haifa, Harvard-Business-Review, Highland-Hospital, Memory-Workshops, PBS, psychiatry, Stanford, Stress, Texas-A&M-University, UCSF, University-of-Michigan, Washington-University

New Neurons: Good News, Bad News

April 25, 2008 by Dr. Bill Klemm

Over the last year we have glad­ly seen an avalanche of news on adult neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis (the cre­ation of new neu­rons in adult brains), fol­low­ing recent research reports. Fur­ther, we have seen how the news that phys­i­cal exer­cise can enhance neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis is becom­ing com­mon knowl­edge among many health sys­tems we work with.

Now, the obvi­ous ques­tion that does­n’t always get asked is, “What good are new neu­rons if they don’t sur­vive?”. And that’s where learn­ing, enrich­ment, men­tal exer­cise, are critical.

We are glad to intro­duce a new Expert Con­trib­u­tor, Dr. Bill Klemm, a pro­fes­sor of Neu­ro­science at Texas A&M Uni­ver­si­ty, who sum­ma­rizes much research on how new neu­rons are born-and what they need to live long hap­py lives.

- Alvaro

New Neu­rons: Good News, Bad News

– By Dr. Bill Klemm

In the last few years, researchers have dis­cov­ered that new nerve cells (neu­rons) are born, pre­sum­ably from resid­ual stem cells that exist even in adults. That should be good news for all of us as we get old­er and fear men­tal decline. The bad news is that these new neu­rons die, unless our minds are active enough.

[Read more…] about New Neu­rons: Good News, Bad News

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: adult-neurogenesis, Bill-Klemm, enriched-environments, enrichment, health-systems, hippocampus, Learning, memory, mental-decline, mental-exercise, neocortex, neuroscience, new-neurons, Physical-Exercise, Ramon-y-Cajal, smart-brains, Texas-A&M-University, Use-It-or-Lose-It

Mental Training for Gratitude and Altruism

July 15, 2007 by Alvaro Fernandez

Bran­don Keim writes a nice post on The Future Sci­ence of Altru­ism at Wired Sci­ence Blog, based on an inter­view with Jor­dan Graf­man, chief of cog­ni­tive neu­ro­science at the Nation­al Insti­tute of Neu­ro­log­i­cal Dis­or­ders and Stroke.

Bran­don pro­vides good con­text say­ing that “Sci­en­tists, said Graf­man, are under­stand­ing how our brains are shaped by cul­ture and envi­ron­ment, and a mech­a­nism of these changes may involve fluc­tu­a­tion in our genes them­selves, which we’re only begin­ning to under­stand”. (more on this in our post Richard Dawkins and Alfred Nobel: beyond nature and nur­ture).

And gives us some very nice quotes from Dr. Graf­man, including

  • “One of the ways we dif­fer­en­ti­ate our­selves from oth­er species is that we have a sense of future. We don’t have to have imme­di­ate grat­i­fi­ca­tion.… But how far can we go into the future? How much of our brain is aimed at doing that? […]”
  • “Oth­er great apes have a frontal lobe, fair­ly well devel­oped, but not near­ly as well devel­oped as our own. If you believe in Dar­win and evo­lu­tion, you argue that the area grew, and the neur­al archi­tec­ture had to change in some way to accom­mo­date the abil­i­ties asso­ci­at­ed with that behav­ior. There’s no doubt that did­n’t occur overnight; prob­a­bly a slow change, and it was one of the last areas of the brain to devel­op as well. It’s very recent evo­lu­tion­ary devel­op­ment that humans took full advan­tage of. What in the future? What in the brains can change?”
  • “The issue becomes — do we teach this? Train peo­ple to do this? Chil­dren tend to be self­ish, and have to be taught to share.”

The UC Berke­ley mag­a­zine Greater Good tries to answer that ques­tion with a series of arti­cles on Grat­i­tude. I espe­cial­ly enjoyed A Les­son in Thanks, described as [Read more…] about Men­tal Train­ing for Grat­i­tude and Altruism

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Filed Under: Brain/ Mental Health Tagged With: accountability, adolescent-brain, adult-neurogenesis, Alexander-Luria, Bill-Klemm, chimps-memory, Cognitive Neuroscience, exercise, Go-Hirano, health-systems, managing-stress, mental-decline, new-neurons, rhyme, strategic-consulting, Texas-A&M-University, write-haiku

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