A cou­ple of excel­lent col­lec­tions of blog posts:

-The Tan­gled Bank: all things sci­ence, with a very clear presentation.

-Med­i­cine 2.0: inter­sec­tion of Health and Web 2.0, hosted by Berta­lan Mesko, its creator.

The move­ment to have US pres­i­den­tial candidates dis­cuss Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy in a devoted debate has been pick­ing up steam. Date and place are sched­uled: April 18th at the Franklin Insti­tute in Philadelphia.

- cospon­sored by the AAAS, the Coun­cil on Com­pet­i­tive­ness, the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, the National Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing, and the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine, and signed by over 100 lead­ing Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties and other organizations

- Fri­day Busi­ness Week ran this story.

–  Intel Chair­man Craig Bar­rett and for­mer HHS Sec­re­tary Donna Sha­lala have Read the rest of this entry »

What were you doing on August 26th, 2006? That day, Mo, the blog­ger behind Sci­ence­Blogs’ Neu­rophi­los­o­phy, launched the Encephalon blog car­ni­val to present, every other week, a selec­tion of the best neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog posts on brain and mind.

It has been one of the most stim­u­lat­ing blog car­ni­vals ever since, and we are hon­ored to con­tinue the tra­di­tion. Today we are proud to announce…

A neu­ro­science blog car­ni­val– Sec­ond Read the rest of this entry »

A quick note to announce that these blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of selected blog posts on spe­cific top­ics) are available:

- Grand Rounds: spec­tac­u­lar edi­tion of the best health and med­i­cine blog car­ni­val, pre­sented in 100% haiku form!

- Encephalon: neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy topics

- Human Resources: good roundup of posts for HR professionals

- Update 1: The Edu­ca­tion one just appeared. Great for teach­ers and school staff

- Update 2: Tan­gled Bank is online too, with great science-related posts

Also, you can check my new arti­cle at the Huff­in­g­ton Post on 10 Habits of Highly Effec­tive Brains.

Here you have a few recent great blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of selected blog posts focused on spe­cific topics):

- Grand Rounds: health and medicine

- Encephalon: neu­ro­science and psychology

- COTC: busi­ness and entrepreneurship

- Human Resources: arti­cles for HR professionals

- Edu­ca­tion: arti­cles for K12 teach­ers and staff

- Tan­gled Bank: gen­eral science 

- Books: good book reviews

 

We also just found a great overview of the brain fit­ness mar­ket in French, sum­ma­riz­ing many of the top­ics we have writ­ten about:

Des logi­ciels qui boos­t­ent le cerveau… et son marché

Atten­tion (or con­cen­tra­tion), and mem­ory are two men­tal skills directly related. In fact, many mem­ory com­plaints have noth­ing to do with the actual abil­ity to remem­ber things. They come from a fail­ure to focus prop­erly on the task at hand.

Take the exam­ple of not remem­ber­ing where you parked your car after shop­ping at the mall… It is likely that you did not pay much atten­tion to where you parked the car in the first place, thus leav­ing your brain with few oppor­tu­ni­ties to reg­is­ter any infor­ma­tion that could be recalled later to help you find your car. The same rea­son­ing goes for not remem­ber­ing where we put our glasses!

Many of our actions are per­formed auto­mat­i­cally. By oppo­si­tion, focus­ing atten­tion is effort­ful. As you know, with age the brain needs more time to process infor­ma­tion.  Along with speed of pro­cess­ing, other brain func­tions decline. A cru­cial one is the abil­ity to focus and ignore distraction.

As we age it thus get harder and harder to pay atten­tion. But focus­ing our atten­tion on the task at hand is key for bet­ter mem­ory per­for­mance. What can we do then to improve con­cen­tra­tion and memory?

One gen­eral solu­tion is to keep the brain healthy. This can be done by adher­ing to the main pil­lars of brain health and main­te­nance: bal­anced diet, phys­i­cal exer­cise, cog­ni­tive stim­u­la­tion, stress man­age­ment, and social engage­ment.

How to improve concentration

• Focus on the task at hand: If talk­ing with some­one: ask ques­tions; if read­ing a book or a report: ask your­self how you would sum­ma­rize what you just read to a friend or to your boss.

• In gen­eral, avoid and/or elim­i­nate dis­trac­tions. Tune out every­thing else. The harder the task, the more impor­tant it is to tune out distractions.

• Do not try to double-task, this will increase your errors and divide your atten­tion. Atten­tion is lim­ited. When you try to do sev­eral things at once, you nec­es­sar­ily have to divide your atten­tion and thus con­cen­trate less on each indi­vid­ual tasks.

• Use med­i­ta­tion. Sev­eral stud­ies have shown that med­i­ta­tion can be a good brain train­ing tool that affects espe­cially atten­tional / con­cen­tra­tion skills.

How to improve memory

• Pay atten­tion and con­cen­trate! (see above)

• Relate to the infor­ma­tion you are learn­ing. The more per­sonal the infor­ma­tion becomes, the eas­ier it is to remem­ber it. Ask your­self how it makes you feel. Ask your­self where else you have heard this. Ask your­self whether there is some­thing in your per­sonal life related to this piece of information.

• Repeat the infor­ma­tion: Come back to it more than one time. This has been found in tons of stud­ies: repeated infor­ma­tion is eas­ier to recall. Spaced retrieval (a method with which a per­son is cued to recall a piece of infor­ma­tion at dif­fer­ent inter­vals) is one of the rare meth­ods that show some results with Alzheimer’s patients.

• Elab­o­rate on the infor­ma­tion: think about it. Things that are con­crete and have a clear mean­ing are eas­ier to remem­ber than abstract and vague ones. Try­ing to attach mean­ing to the infor­ma­tion you are try­ing to mem­o­rize will make it eas­ier to recall later. Your brain will have more cues to look for. For instance, try to pic­ture the infor­ma­tion in your head. Pic­tures are much eas­ier to mem­o­rize than words. To remem­ber fig­ures and per­cent­ages it is much eas­ier to pic­ture these in a graph for instance. Relate the infor­ma­tion to some­thing you know already.

Let’s put it all together: Remem­ber­ing names

We often for­get names in the few sec­ond after we have heard them. Most of the time this phe­nom­e­non can be related to a lack of atten­tion or con­cen­tra­tion. It is also caused by the fact that names have no spe­cific mean­ing and are thus hard to mem­o­rize. Say you are intro­duced to Kim today:

1. Pay atten­tion to the name: Ask Kim to repeat her name if you have not heard it very well. Make a con­scious effort of try­ing to mem­o­rize the name: Focus on it (“Her name is Kim. I want to remem­ber it.”)

2. Relate to the name: What does this per­son make you feel like? Do you know some­one else named like this? Think about this other per­son. (“She seems quite ner­vous, I won­der why. She makes me feel a bit uneasy. Not at all like the other Kim I know from the gym.”)

3. Repeat the name: Use the name sev­eral times in the con­ver­sa­tion. (“What do you think of this, Kim?”) If applic­a­ble, use the person’s busi­ness card later on to read her name over and over.

4. Elab­o­rate on the name: Relate the name to pre­vi­ous infor­ma­tion (“Kim, as in Kim Wilde I used to lis­ten to when I was a kid. Well, she sure doesn’t look like Kim Wilde!”). Pic­ture her face later on in the day as you repeat her name.

Hope this helps!

Related arti­cles on how to improve con­cen­tra­tion and memory:

• How can I improve my short term mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

• The Ten Habits of Highly Effec­tive Brains

And to stim­u­late and chal­lenge your whole brain, check out our Top 50 Brain Teasers!

.

Q: How can I improve my mem­ory? Is there a daily exer­cise I can do to improve it?

A: The most impor­tant com­po­nent of mem­ory is atten­tion. By choos­ing to attend to some­thing and focus on it, you cre­ate a per­sonal inter­ac­tion with it, which gives it per­sonal mean­ing, mak­ing it eas­ier to remem­ber.
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