Why? You would think that schools teach kids how to read well. Schools do try. I work with middle-school teachers (see http://peer.tamu.edu) and they tell me that many students are 2–3 years behind grade level in reading proficiency. No doubt, television, cell phones, and the Web are major contributors to this problem, which will apparently get worse if we don’t emphasize and improve reading instruction.

Some of the blame can be placed on the fads in reading teaching, such as phonics and “whole language,” which sometimes are promoted by zealots who don’t respect the need for both approaches. Much of the blame for poor reading skills can be laid at the feet of parents who set poor examples and, of course, on the youngsters who are too lazy to learn how to read well.

For all those who missed out on good reading skills, it is not too late. I summarize below what I think it takes to read with good speed and comprehension.

1. Read with a purpose.
2. Skim first.
3. Get the reading mechanics right.
4. Be judicious in highlighting and note taking.
5. Think in pictures.
6. Rehearse as you go along.
7. Stay within your attention span and work to increase that span.
8. Rehearse again soon.

1) Know Your Purpose

Everyone should have a purpose for their reading and think about how that purpose is being fulfilled during the actual reading. The advantage for remembering is that checking continuously for how the purpose is being fulfilled helps the reader to stay on task, to focus on the more relevant parts of the text, and to rehearse continuously as one reads. This also saves time and effort because relevant items are most attended.

Identifying the purpose should be easy if you freely choose what to read. Just ask yourself, “Why am I reading this?” If it is to be entertained or pass the time, then there is not much problem. But myriad other reasons could apply, such as:

o to understand a certain group of people, such as Muslims, Jews, Hindus, etc.
o to crystallize your political position, such as why a given government policy should be opposed.
o to develop an informed plan or proposal.
o to satisfy a requirement of an academic course or other assigned reading.

Many of us have readings assigned to us, as in a school environment. Or the boss may hand us a manual and say “Here. We need you to read this.” Whether the order comes from a teacher or boss, we need to ask, “What do you want me to learn from this?” In the absence of such guidance, you should still formulate your best guess about what you should learn and remember from the reading.

2) Skim First

Some reading tasks require no more than skimming. Proper skimming includes putting an emphasis on the headings, pictures, graphs, tables, and key paragraphs (which are usually at the beginning and the end). Depending on the purpose, you should slow down and read carefully only the parts that contribute to fulfilling the reading purpose.

Even material that has to be studied carefully should be skimmed first. The benefits of skimming first are that the skimming: 1) primes the memory, making it easier to remember when you read it the second time, 2) orients the thinking, helping you to know where the important content is in the document, 3) creates an overall sense and gestalt for the document, which in turn makes it easier to remember certain particulars.

Browsing on the Internet encourages people to skim read. The way content is handled on the Web is even causing writers to make wider use of Web devices, such as numbered or bulleted lists, sidebars, graphics, text boxes and sidebars. But the bad news is that the Web style makes it even harder to learn how to read in-depth; that is, the Web teaches us to skim, creating bad reading habits for in-depth reading.

3) Get the Mechanics Right

For in-depth reading, eyes need to move in a disciplined way. Skimming actually trains eyes to move without discipline. When you need to read carefully and remember the essence of large blocks of text, the eyes must snap from one fixation point to the next in left– to right-sequence. Moreover, the fixations should not be one individual letters or even single words, but rather on several words per fixation. There are reading-improvement machines that train the eyes to fixate properly, but few schools use them. I know from personal experience with such machines that they can increase reading speed markedly without a cost in lower comprehension. Poor readers who stumble along from word to word actually tend to have lower comprehension because their mind is preoccupied with recognizing the letters and their arrangement in each word.That is a main reason they can’t remember what they read. Countless times I have heard college students say, “I read that chapter three times, and I still can’t answer your questions.” When I ask thought-provoking questions about the material, they often can’t answer the questions because they can’t remember the meaning of what they read. Even with straightforward simple memorization questions, they often can’t remember, because their focus on the words themselves kept them from associating what their eyes saw with their own pre-existing knowledge and thus facilitating remembering. In short, to remember what you read, you have to think about what the words mean.

I am not arguing against phonics, which in my view is vital for the initial learning of how to read. But phonics is just the first step in good reading practice. At some point, the reader needs to recognize whole words as complete units and then expand that capability to clusters of several words.

Among the key tactics for good mechanics of reading, I list the following:

o Make eye contact with all the text not being deliberately skimmed
o See multiple words in each eye fixation
o Strive to expand the width of each eye fixation (on an 8.5″ width, strive for three fixations or eventually two per line). This skill has to be developed in stages. First, learn how do read at five or six fixations per line. Then work on four per line. Then three.
o Snap eyes from one fixation point to another (horizontal snaps on long lines, vertical snap if whole line in a column can be seen with one fixation).

Learning how to do this takes practice. If you can’t do it on your own, consider formal training from a reading center.

4) Be Judicious in Highlighting and Note Taking

Use a highlighter to mark a FEW key points to act as the basis for mental pictures and reminder cues. Add key words in the margins if you don’t find useful clues to highlight.

Almost all students use highlighter pens to identify key parts of a text. But many students either highlight too much or highlight the wrong things. They become so preoccupied in marking up the book that they don’t pay enough attention to what they are reading. A better approach is to highlight just a few key words on a page. If many pages don’t require highlights, sticky tabs on pages with highlights can greatly speed a study process for whole books.

It is crucial to think about the meaning of text. Highlighted text needs to be rehearsed in the context of how it fits with the purpose, why it needs to be remembered, and how it fits with important material that preceded it. Every few paragraphs or pages, depending on the information density, the reader should stop and self-quiz to make sure the important material is being memorized. Making outline notes of such material after it is first read can be an important rehearsal aid for forming immediate memory and for later study. The act of creating such an outline from working memory, and checking it against the content just read, supports memory formation in very powerful ways.

5) Think in Pictures

A picture may not be worth a thousand words, but it can certainly capture the essence of dozens of words. Moreover, pictures are much easier to memorize than words. Those memory wizards who put on stage shows owe their success (as do card counters in casinos) to use of gimmicks based on mental pictures. Ordinary readers can use to good effect the practice of making mental images of the meaning of text. The highlighted key words in text, for example, if used as a starting point for mental pictures, then become very useful for memorization. One only has to spot the key words and think of the associated mental images. Sometimes it helps to make mental images of headings and sub-heads. Pictures also become easier to remember when they are clustered into similar groups or when they are chained together to tell a story.

Mental pictures are not the only way to facilitate memory for what you read. I understand that actors use another approach for memorizing their lines for a play, movie, or TV show. Actors “get into the part” and study the meaning of the script in depth, which seems to produce memory automatically for them. When the same script is memorized with mental images, it appears that the text is being looked at from the outside, as something to be memorized. Actors, on the other hand, appear to be looking at the same text from the inside, as something to be experienced. The actors probe the deep meaning of the text, which inevitably involves attending to the exact words. For example, they seem to explore why their character would use a given set of wordsto express a particular thought. This is still a process of association, except that actors are associating words with real meaning and context as opposed to contrived visual image meaning and context.

Both approaches require engagement. The reader has to think hard about what is being read, and that is what helps you to remember what is read. As a test to prove my point, after you have go back and look at the seven pieces of clip art in this article. Notice how quickly you can memorize the clips. Then surprise yourself at how much they help you remember about the associated section of this article.

6) Rehearse As You Go Along

Read in short segments (a few paragraphs to a few pages, depending on content density), all the while thinking about and paraphrasing the meaning of what is written.

To rehearse what you are memorizing, see how many of the mental pictures you can reconstruct. Use headings and highlighted words if needed to help you reinforce the mental pictures. Rehearse the mental pictures every day or so for the first few days after reading.

Think about the content in each segment in terms of how it satisfies the purpose for reading. Ask yourself questions about the content. “How does this information fit what I already know and don’t know? Why did the author say that? Do I understand what this means? What is the evidence? Do I agree with ideas or conclusions? Why or why not? What is the practical application?” How much of this do I need to memorize?” Apply the ideas to other situations and contexts. Generate ideas about the content.

It also helps to focus on what is not said. To do that you also have to keep in working memory what was said. This not only helps memory, but you get the opportunity to gain creative insights about the subject. In short, thinking not only promotes memory formation but also understanding.

7) Operate Within Your Attention Span

Paying attention is central to memorization. Trying to read when you can’t concentrate is wasting time. Since most people have short attention spans, they should not try to read dense material for more than 10 or 15 minutes at a time. After such a session, they should take a break and quiz themselves on what they just read.

Ultimately, readers should discipline their attention so they can concentrate for longer periods.

Rehearse Soon After Reading Is Finished

At the reading session end, rehearse what you learned right away. Avoid distractions and multi-tasking because they interfere with the consolidation processes that enable longer-term memory. Answer again the questions about content mentioned in the “Rehearse As You Go Along” section.

Think about and rehearse what you read at least twice later that day. Rehearse again at last once for the next 2–3 days.

In Summary

1. Read with a purpose.
2. Skim first.
3. Get the reading mechanics right.
4. Be judicious in highlighting and note taking.
5. Think in pictures.
6. Rehearse as you go along.
7. Stay within your attention span and work to increase that span.
8. Rehearse again soon.

Reference

Noice, H., and Noice, T. 2000. Two approaches to learning a theatrical script, p. 444–455. In Memory Observed, edited by Ulric Neisser and Ira Hyman, Jr. Worth Publishers, New York, N.Y.

– W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker. As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault‚ and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

More articles on how to improve memory skills:

• How can I improve concentration and memory?
• How can I improve my short-term memory?
• The 10 habits of highly effective brains
• A brain teaser for each cognitive skill

Related articles by Dr. Bill Klemm:

• What You Can do to Improve Mem­ory (and Why It Dete­ri­o­rates in Old Age).
• Improve Mem­ory with Sleep, Prac­tice, and Test­ing.
• Try Think­ing and Learn­ing With­out Work­ing Mem­ory.

Well, as a teacher of such kids when they reach college, I am not impressed. College students these days have short attention spans and have trouble concentrating. They got this way in secondary school. I see this in the middle-school outreach program I help run. At this age kids are really wrapped up in multi-tasking at the expense of focus.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study last year, school kids in all grades beyond the second grade committed, on average, more than six hours per day to TV or videos, music, video games, and computers. Almost one-third reported that “most of the time” they did their homework while chatting on the phone, surfing the Web, sending instant messages, watching TV, or listening to music.

Kids think that this entertainment while studying helps their learning. It probably does make learning less tedious, but it clearly makes learning less efficient and less effective. Multi-tasking violates everything we know about how memory works. Now we have objective scientific evidence that multi-tasking impairs learning. A recent National Academy of Sciences study with college-age students (Reference #1 below) did an experiment where the subjects were to learn a task under two conditions, one with no distractions and the other while listening to high– and low-tone beeps, attending to the high ones. The total amount of learning was the superficially the same in both conditions, but with distractions, the learning was stereotyped and learners had difficulty in applying what they learned to other contexts and situations. The study also used functional MRI (fMRI) to assess brain activity under test conditions. The imaging data indicated that the memory task and the distraction stimuli engage different parts of the brain and that these regions probably compete with each other.

The study did not address the issue of passive distraction, such as listening to music while studying. I think that music can also be a major distraction, except for certain kinds of music played under muted conditions (see my book Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault, pages 47, 165, and 197, Reference #2 below) .

One reason that multi-tasking interferes with memory is that the brain really does not multi-task. It just fools you into thinking so, and the way the brain does handle multiple tasks makes it hard to remember anything.

Brains Can’t Real Multi-task

Our brain works hard to fool us into thinking it can do more than one thing at a time. It can’t. Recent MRI studies at Vanderbilt (#3) prove that the brain is not built for good multi-tasking. When trying to do two things at once, the brain temporarily shuts down one task while trying to do the other. In the study, even doing something as simple as pressing a button when an image is flashed caused a delay in brain operation. MRI images showed that a central bottleneck occurred when subjects were trying to do two things at once, such as pressing the appropriate computer key in response to hearing one of eight possible sounds and uttering an appropriate verbal response when seeing images. Activity in the brain that was associated with each task was prioritized, showing up first in one brain area and then in the other  not in both areas simultaneously. In other words, the brain only worked on one task at a time, postponing the second task and deceiving the subjects into thinking they were working on both tasks simultaneously. The delay between switching functions was as long as a second. It is highly likely, though not yet studied, that the delays and confusion magnify with increases in the number of different things one tries to do simultaneously.

So what has this got to do with memory? Well, if you try to memorize the first task and the brain immediately switches to the second task, performance of the second task interferes with consolidation of the memory of the first task. In my earlier article on memory consolidation, I explained how early memory is vulnerable to interference and must be protected from distractions and new information in order for the memory to be made permanent. Likewise, there are proactive effects wherein what you learn on the first task can interfere with learning on the second. All these problems are compounded if there are three or more tasks in a “multi-tasking” experience.

Multi-tasking and School Performance

A study of 517 California high-school students found that grades were lower in those who socially interacted via MySpace, instant messaging (IM) accounts, or who used cell phones. In the study (4), students answered a questionnaire on what social networking devices they used and when they used them. The answers were paired with the grades (from the previous year and the most recent report card).

In this study, 72% of the students had a My Space account, 76% had a cell phone, and 68% had an IM address. Those who had a MySpace account had significantly lower grades than those without an account. The same was true for those that used IM, compared with those who did not. Cell phone use was also associated with lower grades and the effect was magnified if text messaging was used on cell phones. Not surprisingly, if these devices were used during homework, the grades were even lower than for students who used these technologies outside of homework. Almost half reported text messaging during class time, and their grades were lower than the students who only used IM outside of class.

These are correlational data and do not prove that using these devices causes lower grades. But it is a good bet. Multi-tasking, as when using the communication devices while trying to do homework or learn in class, can be expected to interfere with memory. Poor memory yields lower grades.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

——

References

- #1 Foerde, K., Knowlton, Barbara J., and Poldrack, Russell A. 2006. Modulation of competing memory systems by distraction. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. 103: 11778–11783.
– #2 Klemm, W. R. 2004. Thank You Brain for All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault. Benecton Press. 312 pages.
– #3 Dux, P. E., Ivanoff, J., Asplund, C. LO., and Marois, R. 2007. Isolation of a Central Bottleneck of Information Processing with Time-Resolved fMRI. Neuron. 52 (6): 1109–1120
– #4 Pierce, Tamyra, and Vaca, Roberto. 2007. Distracted: academic performance differences between teen users of MySpace and other communication technologies. Proceedings EISTA. Orlando, FL. July. http://www.cyber-inf.org/imsci2007/Program/html/program-5.htm

So is there anything you can do about it besides exercise like crazy, eat healthy foods that you don’t like all that much, pop your statin pills, and take up yoga?

Yes. In short: focus, focus, focus.

Changing thinking styles can help. Research shows that older people tend to have lost some of their ability to pay attention, which fortunately can be improved if they work at it. More specifically, older people tend to have difficulty in ignoring distractions and irrelevant stimuli. Distractions and a reduced ability to focus disrupt the consolidation process that converts working memory into long-lasting form.

In one study of this aging problem, a typical group of trials involved presenting a picture of a face for about a second, a picture of a scene for about a second, then a picture of another face for about a second, and then another picture of a different scene for about a second.  Then after a nine-second delay a picture was presented and the subject was instructed to press a button to indicate whether the stimulus matched one of the previously presented stimuli. In other words, the subject had to suppress the memory of irrelevant stimuli. In this study (Gazzaley,  et al.  2005) the investigators went beyond behavioral assessment of the responses, because that kind of thing had been done before.  What they wanted to know was what was happening in the brain during this suppression of irrelevant task. They used functional magnetic resonance (fMRI) imaging over a region of brain that was responsive to the visual images.  What was being measured was the amount of brain activity under conditions when the instructions were to remember a type of image or ignore it.  What they found was that brain activity in all of the young subjects increased when they were viewing scenes they were asked to remember and decreased when presented with an image that they were supposed to have ignored. That is, the brain suppressed its response to irrelevant stimuli.  Many older participants, however, were unable to suppress brain activity when presented with stimuli that they had been asked to ignore.  So what these data suggest is that older individuals have difficulty in ignoring irrelevant or distracting information that is contained in working memory.  But let us not come away with the conclusion that memory deficits in the elderly are inevitable, when in fact in this study nearly half of the elderly showed no deficit.

In a study at the University of Illinois (Fabiani, M. et al. 2006.), researchers recorded brain electrical responses in young adults and old subjects (65–78) who were passively listening to bursts of sound that contained a base frequency of 500 cycles per second, with superimposed higher frequencies at lower amplitude. Sound volume was adjusted to the hearing threshold for each subject. Sound was presented while subjects were instructed to concentrate on reading a book and to ignore the sound bursts. Four bursts were delivered with variable silent intervals. The brain registered the memory of each burst in the size of the evoked electrical response. The repetition of sound burst was expected to induce suppression of the sound-evoked electrical response to later bursts in the train, while the silent interval was expected to allow for recovery as the memory of a preceding burst decays. By varying the interval, researchers could evaluate the decay process.

Results revealed that the electrical responses persisted longer in older people, but the effects of delay interval were the same irrespective of age. Since age did not seem to affect memory decay, one is left to conclude that the brains of older subjects were less able to inhibit the sound burst distractions. The good news for the elderly is that age does not make you forget any faster. It does, apparently, make you more distractible.

Such studies should probably also be done in children, who I would suspect are more like older people in being less able to inhibit distractions.

A study at the University of Toronto (Grady, C. L. et al. 2006.) used MRI imaging of people while they performed a variety of memory tasks, both during encoding and recognition. They found an age-related increase in activity in brain areas that normally decrease during task performance. This is interpreted to indicate that these areas normally do not respond during a memory task because the brain is paying attention to the task and assigning the memory work only to the parts of brain that need to process the memory. However, another interpretation is that as you get older, your brain has to recruit more help from other parts of the brain. A related finding of the research was an age-related decrease of activity in brain areas that normally become activated during the memory task. The researchers thought that this finding indicated an age-related decline in ability to distinguish task-related demands from those that were irrelevant. It could also be that as you age, the circuits that are normally needed to handle memory are less capable. However you look at it, the findings document an age-related decline in the brain’s ability to focus its neural resources on memory tasks. What may be most troublesome to contemplate is that the brain activity-pattern changes showed signs of decline around age 40.

So, what do we do about attention deficit? One possibility is that by keeping our brain working hard as we age, we might reduce this tendency to lose ability to handle memory workload. Think of it like exercise for the brain, which strengthens the neural circuits in the parts of the brain that have to distinguish irrelevant from relevant information in memory tasks and those parts of the brain that have to do the memory work. Another general strategy is to reduce the distractions in our life, at least distractions that are present when we are trying to remember something. Multi-tasking is hard enough to do when you are young. That ability probably declines markedly as you get older. On those occasions when I forget what I opened the refrigerator door for, it is always because I let myself get distracted between the time I decided what I wanted and the time when I opened the door. Obviously, older people (and children) need to work at paying attention, disciplining the brain to concentrate. Second, since they are so distractible, information should be absorbed in smaller, more manageable chunks. By lowering the memory demand, the brain’s limited resources can deal with it more effectively.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You, Brain, For All You Remember. What You Forgot Was My Fault and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

Sources:

- Fabiani, M. et al. 2006. Reduced suppression or labile memory? Mechanisms of inefficient filtering of irrelevant information in older adults. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18 (4): 637–650.

- Gazzaley, A.  et al.  2005. Top-down suppression deficit underlies working memory impairment in normal aging.  Nature Neuroscience. 8: 1298–1300.

- Grady, C. L. et al. 2006. Age-related changes in brain activity across the adult lifespan. J. Cognitive Neuroscience. 18:227–241.

Now, what is “memory”? how does the process of memory work?

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.

1. Over-training: You Can Learn Too Much

Experiments have shown that human memory performance unexpectedly deteriorated if learning sessions were increased to four 60-minute sessions at regular intervals on the same day. In other words, the more the subjects were trained, the poorer they performed. However, this interference did not occur if subjects were allowed to nap for 30–60 minutes between the second and third sessions.

It is hard to explain why over-training disrupts performance, but I suspect that as training trials are repeated the information starts to interfere with memory consolidation, perhaps because of boredom or fatigue in the neural circuits that mediate the learning. Napping must have a restorative function that compensates for the negative effects of over-training. What all this suggests is that memory consolidation would be optimized if learning occurred in short sessions that are repeated but only with intervening naps and on different days with regular night-time sleep. In other words, repeating long study periods in the same day on the same task can be counter-productive. This is yet another reason why students should not cram-study for exams. Learning should be optimized by rehearsing the same learning material on separate days where normal sleep occurred each night.

Sources:

- Maquet, P. et al. 2002. Be caught napping: you’re doing more than resting your eyes.Nature Neuroscience. 5 (7); 618–619.

- Mednick, Sara, et al. 2002. The restorative effect of naps on perceptual deterioration.Nature Neuroscience. 5 (7): 677–681.

2. Losing Your Past

Do you remember the names of your elementary-school teachers? How about the name of the bully in middle school? Or names of your friends when you were a kid? These are all things you remembered well at one time and remembered for a long time. But you may well have forgotten by now.

A recent study on rats suggests what it takes to sustain longer term memories. Rats in the study learned a “bait shyness” task. Rats were given a drink of saccharin-flavored water, and then shortly afterwards injected with lithium, which made them nauseated. This was a typical conditioned learning situation, as with Pavlov’s dogs. In this case, rats typically remembered to avoid such water for many weeks. This is the basis for “bait shyness.” If rats survive a poisoning episode, they will avoid that bait in the future. In this experiment, one group of rats received an injection directly into the part of the brain that holds taste memories. This injection contained a drug that blocks a certain enzyme, a protein kinase. These rats lost their learned taste aversion. The bad memory was lost irrespective of when the injection was made during the 25 days after learning occurred. Giving the enzyme blocker before learning had no effect on learning to avoid the flavored water. The protein kinase thus seems to be necessary for sustaining a long-term memory. It is possible that other long-term memories the rats may have had were also wiped out by the enzyme-blocking drug.

So what is the practical importance? I suggest that even “long-term” memories have to get rehearsed or they may eventually forgotten. Or if you do remember, there is a good chance that the memory is corrupted, that is, not totally correct. The consequence is that things that happened long ago may be either forgotten, or misremembered.

What sustains the enzyme necessary for long-term memory? I suspect it is rehearsal and periodic reactivation of the memory. Some scientists are excited about the possibility of developing a drug to manipulate levels of the enzyme. The problem with that, however, is that the drug could abolish old memories that you might not want to forget (like your name) or may cause you to remember too much that is now irrelevant.

Source: Shema, R., Sacktor, T. C., and Dudai, Y. 2007. Rapid erasure of long-term memory associations in the cortex by an inhibitor of PKM. Science. 317:951–953.

3. Testing Promotes Consolidation

Tests do more than just measure learning. Tests are learning events. That is, testing forces retrieval of incompletely learned material and that very act of retrieval is a rehearsal process that helps to make the learning more permanent. Testing, and not actual studying, is the key factor on whether or not learning is consolidated into longer term memory.

A recent report from Washington University in St. Louis, examined the role that retrieval had on the ability to recall that same material after a delay of a week. In the experiment, college students were to learn a list of 40 foreign language vocabulary word pairs that were manipulated so that the pairs either remained in the list (were repeatedly studied) or were dropped from the list once they were recalled. It was like studying flash cards: one way is to keep studying all the cards over and over again; the other way is to drop out a card from the stack every time you correctly recalled what was on the other side of the card. After a fixed study period, students were tested over either the entire list or a partial list of only the pairs that had not been dropped during study. Four study and test periods alternated back-to-back. Students were also asked to predict how many pairs they would be able to remember a week later, and their predictions were compared with actual results on a final test a week later.

The initial learning took about 3–4 trials to master the list, and was not significantly affected by the strategy used (rehearsing the entire list or dropping items out as they were recalled). On average, the students predicted that they would be able to remember about half of the list on a test that was to be given a week later. However, actual recall a week later varied considerably depending on learning conditions. On the final test, students remembered about 80% of the word pairs if they had been tested on all the word pairs, no matter whether they had been studied multiple times with all of them in the list or if they dropped correctly recalled words from the list in later study trials. However, recall was only about 30% correct when correctly identified words were dropped from subsequent tests, even though all words were studied repeatedly. In other words, it was the repeated testing, not the studying, that was the key factor in successful longer-term memory.

So, what is the practical application? When using flash cards, for example, you need to follow each study session (whether or not you drop cards from the stack because you know them), with a formal test over all the cards. Then, repeat the process several times, with study and test epochs back-to-back. Can we extend this principle of frequent testing to other kinds of learning strategies? I would guess so.

Why does forced recall, as during testing, promote consolidation? It probably relates to other recent discoveries showing that each time something is recalled the memory is re-consolidated. If the same information is consolidated again and again, the memory is presumably reinforced.

This study also showed that the subjects could not predict how well they would remember, which is consistent with my 45 years experience as a professor. Students are frequently surprised to discover after an examination that they did not know the material as well as they thought they did. Tests not only reveal what they know and don’t know, but serve to increase how much they eventually learn. If I were still teaching, I would give more tests. And I would encourage students to use self-testing as a routine learning strategy, something that one study revealed to be a seldom-used strategy. The repeated self-tests should include all the study material and not drop out the material that the student thinks is already mastered.

Source: Karpicke, Jeffrey D., and Roedinger, Henry L. III. 2008. The critical importance of retrieval for learning. Science. 319: 966–968.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You Brain For All You Remember and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

If you have enough working memory to both be processing this information and developing your own thoughts, you may be thinking now, a) what exactly is Working Memory?, and b) why do we even care?. Well, Dr. Bill Klemm answers those questions, and more, below. Please enjoy one of the most insightful articles on the subject we have seen in a long while, which we are proud to bring to SharpBrains readers.

- Alvaro

How Well People Think Depends On Working Memory

- By  Dr. Bill Klemm

Imagine dialing a phone number by having to look up each digit one at a time in the phone book. Normally, you look up the number and remember all seven digits long enough to get it dialed. Even with one digit at a time, you would have to remember each digit long enough to get it dialed. What if your brain could not even do that! We call this kind of remembering, “working memory,” because that is what the brain works with. Working memory is critical to everyday living.

Conscious thought involves moving a succession of items through what seems like a virtual scratch-pad. Think of it like streaming audio/video, where “thought bites” move on to the scratch pad where they are fed into a thought process and then moved off the scratch pad to make room for the next thought bite.

We think with what is in working or “scratch pad” memory. What we know, stored in regular memory, is brought onto the scratch pad in successive stages, each involving subjecting the knowledge to analysis, integration into the current context, and creative re-organization via our thinking processes (“thought engine”). The animated version of this graphic shows item 1 moving on to the scratch pad and then sent on to the “thought engine.” This is followed by item 2, then 3, etc.

Conscious thinking thus requires the ability to hold information “on line” long enough to use it in thinking. Conscious thought thus seems to be a serially ordered process of moving thought bites on to and off of the scratch pad.

Unconscious Thinking

What about unconscious thought … the kind that occurs when you are not paying attention? We know that the subconscious mind is processing information (i.e. “thinking”) all the time, even while we sleep. The evidence for this kind of “sleep learning” is incontrovertible and summarized in my memory improvement book (see http://thankyoubrain.com). Subconscious thinking and its related memories may not involve a scratch pad of working memory. Subconscious thinking could occur as multiple parallel processes and may be more non-linear than conscious thought. However, in the case of dream sleep, which I regard as a form of consciousness, those dreams that I happen to remember do seem to be based on serially ordered “thought bites.”

A recent study, not explicitly concerning memory, sheds some important light both on how we think and on the role of working memory in thought. In this study, the researchers examined how people make a correct choice. Researchers compared the quality of decisions formed from conscious versus unconscious thinking with that resulting from unconscious thinking. Here is how they studied this issue. In one study, subjects were given information about the attributes of four hypothetical cars, and they were to decide which was the best car, based on the attributes assigned to each car. Analysis conditions were either simple (based on only four attributes) or complex (based on 12 attributes). After reading about the attributes, subjects were assigned to one of two groups: conscious analysis or to an unconscious thought condition. In the conscious condition, they thought about the attributes for four minutes before making a choice. In the unconscious condition, subjects were told they would have to make a choice in four minutes, but they were distracted during that time by being required to solve anagrams.

Their “thinking” about the problem was thus not allowed to be conscious.

Not surprisingly, when only four attributes were involved, subjects in the conscious-thought condition made the best choice of car. But when the complex condition of 12 attributes, results reversed. The best car was chosen most reliably in the unconscious-thought condition.

In a second study, one change was made. Instead of choosing the best car, subjects were asked about their attitudes toward the four cars. Again, conscious thinkers made the clearest distinctions among the cars when only four attributes were considered, but the opposite occurred when 12 attributes had to be considered.

In another experiment, two stores were selected, one that sold complicated items like furniture and the other a department store that sold simple products. As people left the store, people were asked questions about what they bought, why they bought it, how costly was it, and how much they thought about making the choice. The buyers were categorized as either “thinkers” (those who spent a lot of time consciously making a decision) and “impulse buyers” (who did not spend much time consciously thinking about their choice). Several weeks later, these same people were called to check on how satisfied they were with the purchase. As expected, more post-choice satisfaction was found in the conscious thinker group, but only for the simple items in the department store. For the complex choices in the furniture store, the unconscious thinkers expressed the most satisfaction with their purchases.

What all this says is that simple decisions are best made by careful conscious thought. But for complicated decisions, the best choices may result from “deliberation without paying attention,” that is letting the thinking be done by the unconscious mind. I interpret these results to reflect the dependence of conscious thought on scratch-pad memory and the relative independence of subconscious thought on scratch-pad memory. Conscious thought is very effective as long as it can work on information that it can hold on-line in working memory. But working memory has limited capacity. Therefore it cannot be very effective when the amount of information needed for high-quality thought exceeds the carrying capacity of working memory.

The corollary of this new evidence about working memory and thinking processes is that if we had a bigger working memory, we might think better.

Working Memory Load Affects Paying Attention

Paying attention is pre-requisite to learning. The ability to pay attention seems to be affected by how much information (load) is being carried in working memory. These principles have been elucidated in human experiments that tested the assumption that attending to relevant details in a learning situation requires that the details be held in working memory. Having other, non-relevant, information in working memory at the same time serves as a distraction, lowering attention and interfering with memory formation.

In this experiment, participants performed an attention task that required them to ignore pictures of distracter faces while holding in working memory a string of digits that were in the same order (low memory load) or different order (high memory order) on every trial. The test thus was one of multi-tasking, one task being holding the digits in working memory and the other task being identifying whether a name flashed on the screen was that of a famous politician or a pop star, while a contradictory face was projected. For example, the name Mick Jagger would have the face of Bill Clinton superimposed, and the task was to know that Mick Jagger is a pop star, not a politician.

The attention performance degraded severely with high working-memory load. That is, the distracting faces created confusion when subjects were also required to hold mixed-order digits in working memory at the same time.

The point is simple. It is hard to think about two complicated things at once. The growing trend, especially among young people, to multi-task may seem wonderful. But actually, multi-tasking is most likely to interfere with focused attention and, in turn, degrade memory formation, recall, and thinking quality.

Training Working Memory and IQ

Studies have shown that it is possible to train ADHD children to have better working memories. This led researchers in Japan to try to develop a simple working memory training method and to test whether this method can increase the working memory capacity and whether this has any effect on a child’s 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 third 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 that working memory correlated with IQ test scores. That is, children with better working memory ability also had higher IQs. When first graders were tested for intelligence, 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.

So in conclusion, it seems that working memory capacity can be increased by training and that such training can even raise IQ, at least in young children.

Benefits of Increasing Working Memory

Accumulating evidence seems to indicate that working memory, with proper training, can be improved in anyone, even adults. I recently found a research report in which lasting improvements in brain function were produced in healthy adults by only five weeks of practice on three working-memory tasks that involved the location of objects in space. Subjects performed 90 trials per day on a training regimen (CogMed). MRI scans showed increased activity in the cortical areas that were involved in processing the visual stimuli. Brain activity increases in these areas appeared within the first week and grew over time.

Similar results have been reported by other investigators. In a few cases, where different kinds of stimuli were used, memory training induced a decrease of brain activity in certain areas, which is interpreted to indicate that the trained brain did not have to work as hard. While we clearly don’t understand things very well, it seems clear that working memory training not only improves memory capability but also causes lasting changes in the brain.

Help Your Working-Memory Capacity

I just read a fascinating book on increasing teacher awareness of the importance of working-memory capacity for teaching and learning strategies. Many youngsters have working memory limitations, and they usually do not grow out of them. This is a major and serious cause of low grades, poor learning skills, poor confidence, and life-long diminished motivation to learn.

Limited working-memory capacity impairs the ability to think and solve problems. I was told once by a middle-school teacher that her “special needs” students could do the same math as regular students, but they just can’t remember all the steps. This clearly reflects a limited working-memory capacity. If the demands made on working memory could be lessened, better thinking could result.

Certain strategies can help to reduce the load on working memory. Teachers should model and students should employ the following devices:

• Provide help, cues, mnemonics, reminders.
• KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid!)(example: use short, simple sentences, present much of the instruction as pictures/diagrams).
• Don’t present so much information. Less can be more.
• Facilitate rehearsal, using only relevant information and no distractors.
• Get engaged, by taking notes, and creating diagrams and concept maps.
• Attach meaning from what is already known. (The more you know, the more you can know).
• Organize information in small categories.
• Break down tasks into small chunks. Master each chunk sequentially, one at a time.

Doing these things not only helps the thinking process, but will also promote the formation of lasting memories. The process of converting working memory into permanent form is called consolidation, and I will explain that next time.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You Brain For All You Remember and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

Related articles on Working Memory Training

- Can Intelligence Be Trained? Martin Buschkuehl shows how

- Working Memory Training: Interview with Dr. Torkel Klingberg

- Working Memory Training for Adults

Sources

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2. Dijksterhuis, A. et al. 2006. On making the right choice: the deliberation-without-attention effect. Science. 311: 1005–1007.

3. Wajima, Kayo, and Sawaguchi, T. 2005. The effect of working memory training on general intelligence in children. Society for Neuroscience Abstracts. Abstract 772.11.

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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.

Ever since the neuron doctrine was firmly established by the independent histological studies of Golgi and Ramon y Cajal, the prevailing dogma was that the after birth, no new neurons appear. We now know that prevailing dogma was wrong. In 1965, Joseph Altman and Goapl Das documented neurogenesis in adult rat hippocampus. Then, in 1977, Michael Kaplan and James Hinds used radioactive thymidine incorporation to show that neurogenesis occurred in the olfactory bulb and hippocampal dentate gyrus of the rat. In these areas, new neurons seem to appear throughout life.

Another apparent exception is in a group of neurons associated with singing in songbirds. In 1983, Fernando Nottebohm documented neurogenesis in the cortex of adult canaries. Here, birth and death of neurons seems to change with seasons of the weather. In Spring, when birds are courting with songs and mating, the neurons in this nucleus proliferate noticeably, only to regress after the mating season.

In 1977, Elizabeth Gould showed that new neurons appeared in adult tree shrews and that stress decreased the number of neurons in the hippocampal dentate gyrus. Ten in 1998, Rusty Gage used the dividing cell marker, bromodeoxyuridine, to show that new neurons occur in adult humans.

There have been claims of adult neurogenesis in several regions of neocortex, but these fndings are in dispute because of methodological issues. Original demonstrations of adult neurogenesis were based on the reasonable approach of injecting radiolabeled cell-division markers and then checking for incorporation in the nucleus of cells, indicative of newly formed DNA. Advanced technology using carbon-14 dating shows that in the human cortex, new neurons do not seem to appear in the adult, though it is clear that they appear in the hippocampus.

Neurogenesis in adults may be manipulable, but research in this area is just beginning. Recently, one study demonstrated that new neurons could be triggered by direct injection of a chemical that stimulates neurogenesis into the feeding center area of the hypothalamus of rodents. Survival of these new neurons in the adult depends on their ability to make functional contacts with existing neurons. Typically, about half of new neurons failed to integrate into existing networks, and they died.

In another study, exposing mice to enriched environments (running wheels, colored tunnels, and playmates) increased the survival percentage of new neurons up to about 80%. “Use it or lose it” seems to be the motto for new neurons.

Exercise has been found important for human brain. Researchers have studied MRI images of exercising humans and found that the blood volume increased in the hippocampus in those subjects that underwent a three-month aerobic exercise program. Those subjects also performed better than controls on memory tasks. Such results indicated that new blood vessels had grown into the brain area. The inference is that this new blood supply was needed to support new neurons, and although there are other explanations, this is a reasonable speculation.

The Hippocampus and Memory.

The brain area known as the hippocampus is the one area where everyone agrees new neurons are born in the adult. The hippocampus is crucial for the for the conversion of certain short-term, scratch pad, memories into permanent form. Animal experiments have shown that the production of new neurons in the hippocampus is stimulated by enriched environments and by learning experiences. But do these new cells function normally? Do they support learning? And do these new neurons survive? Some animal observations indicate that new neurons in the hippocampus only live about one month.

An answer has come from some recent animal experiments that examined the role of new neurons in adults in learning of a water maze and the effect of the maze learning on survival of these new cells. The water maze involved training rats to find a submerged safe platform in a tub of water made opaque so that the platform could not be seen. Training was performed under one of two conditions: 1) location of the platform was cued by an overhead black and white striped rod, or 2) location was indicated by the spatial relationship of the platform to objects outside the tub, such as objects on the room walls, that could be seen by the rat.

The existing population of dentate cells was killed by low-level irradiation. Rats so treated could not form long-term memories for the safe location in the spatially cued task. However, if they were trained after new neurons were born, then they learned the task. This effect was specific to spatial cues, because new cells were not needed to learn the task when the platform was indicated by the vertical rod pointer. By irradiating certain groups of rats at different times before and after training, the researchers found that new neurons 4–28 days old at the time of training were important for the spatial learning. Thus, these new neurons were functional. They knew what to do and how to do it.

So, it would seem that new neurons not only can be born in adult hippocampus, but that they perform the learning job that was done by their predecessors, at least as regarding learning that involves spatial relationships. A learning-rich environment helps these new neurons live longer.

New Neurons. Use Them or Lose Them.

In rodents, the number of new neurons in the hippocampus is on the order of thousands per day. These new neurons may not survive and become useful in memory formation if they are not needed. Need seems to be established by ongoing requirements to form more memories. Learning not only stimulates new neurons to proliferate the membrane “sprouts” that make connections with other neurons but also increases the survival of neurons born up to a week before the learning. In other words, use them or lose them..

A recent study of aged rodent learning of spatial relationships in a water maze has revealed that in “smart” rats that were good at learning a water maze, maze learning increased the survival of new cells born before the learning. An earlier study had shown that in young rats, increased survival of new neurons occurred in all rats, irrespective of their previous memory abilities.

Time Is Critical

A critical window of time determines whether or not the new neurons survive. In an experimental test of this time window, mice were housed for one week in an environmentally rich environment (toys, activity wheels, etc.), or for controls in regular cages, beginning one week after injection with a new-neuron DNA-synthesis marker. Results showed that lasting increase was restricted to new neurons that appeared between one and three weeks before living in an enriched environment. This corresponds to the time when new neurons are extending their neurons in search of targets and their dendrites are developing synaptic contacts to the neurotransmitters normally used in the hippocampus. The new neurons that developed during this time window survived up to the four months of monitoring, even when removed the enriched environment. It would seem that the learning experiences encountered in a rich environment provide the stimulus needed to help new neurons get established into memory-forming circuits, but there is a limited critical time when this effect occurs.

— W. R. (Bill) Klemm, D.V.M., Ph.D. Scientist, professor, author, speaker As a professor of Neuroscience at Texas A&M University, Bill has taught about the brain and behavior at all levels, from freshmen, to seniors, to graduate students to post-docs. His recent books include Thank You Brain For All You Remember and Core Ideas in Neuroscience.

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- Goodman, C. S., and Spitzer, N. C. 1979. Embryonic developmento f identified neurons: diferentiation from neuroblast to neuron. Nature. 280: 208–213.

- Gorio, Alfredo, Ed. 1993. Neuroregeneration. Raven Press, N.Y., N.Y.

- Kokoeva„ M. V., Yin, H., and Flier, J. S. 2005. Neurogenesis in the hypothalamus of adult mice: potential role in energy balance. Science. 310: 679–683.

- Macklis, J. D., and Kempermann, G. 2006. Adult neurogenesis and neural precursors, progenitors, and stem cells in the adult CNS, p. 303–325. In Textbook of Neural Repair and Rehabilitation, edited by M. Selzer et al. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, U.K.

- Pereira, A. C. et al. 2007. An in vivo correlate of exercise-induced neurogenesis in the adult dentate gyrus. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 104(13): 5638–5643.

- Snyder, J. S. et al. 2005. A role for adult neurogenesis in spatial long-term memory. Neuroscience. 130: 843–852.

- Tashiro, A., Makino, H., and Gage, F. H. 2007. Experience-specific functional modification of the dentate gyrus through adult neurogenesis: A critical period during an immature stage. J. Neurosci. 27: 3252–3259.