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T h e M e m o r y K e y
<http://www.memory-key.com>

Your resource for information about memory and memory improvement

May 2008

<http://www.memory-key.com/newsletters/issue_122.htm>

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THIS MONTH ON MEMORY-KEY.COM:

BRAIN-TRAINING PROGRAMS

VISUALLY PRESENTING YOUR INFORMATION

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NEW: The original Memory Key is now available as an e-book!
Check it out at: http://www.memory-key.com/shop/memkey_ebook.htm.
Note that you can now use your credit cards on Paypal.

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Check out the e-book on "Effective notetaking" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/notetaking_workbook.htm

and the e-book on "Remembering intentions" at:
http://www.memory-key.com/shop/intention_ebook.htm

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NEW: Sequel to Secrets available!
Find out about my YA novels at: http://www.fmmcpherson.com/ ========================================

BRAIN-TRAINING PROGRAMS

I have just read yet another article about baby-boomers’ terror that they’re losing their minds — that is, experiencing a decline in their cognitive faculties. This has led to a boom in brain training software, which I’m not decrying. But I do believe its value, and the need for it, has been over-hyped.

Let’s look first at the need.

I read these tales about panic-ridden moments when you go to post a letter and forget the very familiar address, or forget the name of someone you know very well, or wander into a room and forget why you’re there, and my first thought is not that the person is on the slippery slope to dementia, but that the person is distracted. These moments happen to everyone, but when they happen to us in our 40s or 50s or 60s, we are far more likely to invest the moment with greater significance than it deserves. When it happened, and it assuredly did!, when we were in our 20s, we brushed it off.

We all get distracted, and we are all vulnerable to these moments of confusion. (For more on this, check out my articles on short-term memory problems, indexed at http://www.memory-key.com/Improvement/problems.htm ) But we are more vulnerable to them as we get older. I don’t deny there’s something real going on with us aging baby-boomers — the same thing that means when you’re older you generally find you can’t stay up to all hours, eat nothing but junk food, and be raring to go the next day. A 40 or 50, or 60 year old body is not, as a rule, the same as one in its 20s. But that doesn’t mean a 50-year-old can’t out-run, out-think, out-last a 20-year-old; it just means she has to be wiser in looking after herself.

This means the same things you’ve heard about endlessly: physical exercise, healthy diet, sufficient sleep.

Especially sleep, I suspect! Because sleep deficit is so common in Western, especially American, culture, when anyone tells me they have persistent problems of this sort, my first thought is always, are they getting enough sleep?

Sleep really messes with your abilities to concentrate, not just in the obvious tasks that demand lots of concentration, but in the daily round. Yes, as long as you follow your accustomed routine, you don’t need much attention, but as soon as you do something out of your routine — decide to reduce the sugar in your coffee, go to do something you don’t often do or don’t do at that time, see someone — you need that executive function. And there are three big, everyday, factors that mess with this: lack of sleep, too much stress, and multi-tasking.  

Gary Marcus, author of several successful books on the human mind, has written an article recently in the LA Times that talks about why we find it so hard to stick to our goals, and in it he points out: “Yet the brain is structured such that the more tired, stressed or distracted we are, the less likely we are to use our forebrains and the more likely to lean back on the time-tested but shortsighted machinery we've inherited from our ancestors.” (http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-marcus4-2008may04,0,5015266.story) The forebrain, that’s where our executive functions are, our higher-order thinking.  

(I have articles on sleep and memory at http://www.memory-key.com/NatureofMemory/sleep.htm , and on the perils of multitasking at http://www.memory-key.com/EverydayMemory/multitasking.htm . Scientific American also recently put up an article on paying back “sleep debt”, which some of you may find interesting, at http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=fact-or-fiction-can-you-catch-up-on-sleep)

So, I don’t think the failing memory epidemic really reflects an explosion of forthcoming dementia — I do think it reflects too many people being too stressed, too tired, and trying to do too much.

Okay, that’s the over-hyped needs. Now let’s talk about the value of such brain-training software, which I also think is over-hyped — though not, I hasten to add, without value.

Years of research have well established that training on a cognitive task improves your ability only for that task and tasks closely related. (A recent report does claim to have found a mental exercise that may have broader effects, but this has been viewed with scepticism by other researchers. See http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=study-shows-brain-power-can-be-bolstered&sc=WR_20080506. But even if that is so, it doesn’t refute the fact that most mental training has more limited effects.).

This suggests that brain training software, while able to improve your abilities at certain tasks, will only improve your abilities at those tasks. So you need to look at the tasks you are training for and ask yourself if these are truly tasks you are interested in improving your skills at.

Of course, the main justification for this sort of training tool is more general, based on the research indicating that mental stimulation helps stave off cognitive decline and even dementia. But mental stimulation covers a lot of ground: talking to people can be mentally stimulating; dancing can be mentally stimulating; reading books can be mentally stimulating. And all these activities can also be mentally stultifying! It all depends. That is why it’s so important to choose the activities that are right for you. Think broadly. And think about your emotional engagement, not just the mental stimulation. Activities that truly stimulate you are ones that you emotionally connect with — it might be an activity that your friends and family regard as excruciatingly boring! Don’t let that dissuade you.

You also need to think of balance. It seems to me that many of the people who are concerned with their mental fitness are people who already live a life that provides plenty of mental stimulation — they would probably be better off putting the time into reducing their stimulation! Relaxation techniques, and activities that relax and refresh them, may be of more benefit than yet another mentally demanding task.

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VISUALLY PRESENTING YOUR INFORMATION

I’ve been browsing data visualization blogs lately, and thought I’d pass on some of my favorites.

For learning how to improve your graphics, my favorite is at http://www.numberpix.com/, which is at a nice level, I feel — some of the data visualization people put a bit too much emphasis on aesthetics and being clever, but this remembers that the point of graphic representations is to convey the information clearly (but still being more aesthetically pleasing).

If you want practice in analysing graphical representations, there’s a nice blog at http://junkcharts.typepad.com/junk_charts/ that takes particular graphs and points out what’s wrong with them. Educational both for readers and presenters!

And this is brilliant: a graphic presentation indexing different visualization techniques — just hover over the cell and a pop-up will appear, showing an example of the technique. Check it out at http://www.visual-literacy.org/periodic_table/periodic_table.html#  

Those are my three top choices, but here’s some more worth looking at.

For some positive examples, Todd Holloway has an interesting collection of 10 New York Times visualizations at http://abeautifulwww.com/2008/04/03/10-new-york-times-visualizations/#more-145. And these four blogs all have examples, plus useful advice about data visualization techniques:

http://blog.many-eyes.com/

http://diuf.unifr.ch/people/bertinie/visuale/

http://informationandvisualization.de/

http://perceptualedge.com/blog/

If you’re particularly interested in maps, there’s an interesting blog at http://makingmaps.wordpress.com/

For those who are technically inclined, Juice analytics (http://www.juiceanalytics.com/writing/ ) gives scripts and widgets for data presentation, such as a comparison chart generator that can take data from an Excel spreadsheet and generate a chart as a jpg.

 

And this is completely digressive, but I came across it when reviewing data visualization blogs: one blogger worked out his personal productivity daily rhythm, and presented it as graphic. It’s a good idea to be tuned in to your circadian rhythm, so here’s the link: http://www.productiveflourishing.com/how-heatmapping-your-productivity-can-make-you-more-productive/

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The Memory Key website is named after my book "The Memory Key", a
practical user-friendly handbook designed to help people achieve
genuine, long-lasting memory improvement.

http://www.memory-key.com/AboutTheSite/about_book.htm

www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1564144704/thememorykey-20

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