Good Memory - Good Tips

A new school year - a new challenge. You might see your child having difficulties with learning and memorizing new tings, remembering friends’ names, or missing some staff in his/her school backpack. Why? There are few possible answers. Your child may be eating inappropriately, not getting enough physical activities or sleep/rest. After checking off the above factors you can look for some other solutions to help your child to improve his/her memory and mental performance by exercising his/her brain and teaching supportive techniques. Strong memory depends on the health and vitality of the brain.

The human brain has an astonishing ability to adapt and change known as neuroplasticity. With the right stimulation, your brain can form new neural pathways, alter existing connections, and adapt and react in ever-changing ways. The brain’s incredible ability to reshape itself holds true when it comes to learning and memory. You can harness the natural power of neuroplasticity to increase cognitive abilities, enhance ability to learn new information, and improve memory. Let me share my findings with you.

Healthy Diet - What kind?

1. Look for healthy fats - Omega-3. Much of a brain cell's structure is made up of "healthy fats". The most important of these are the Omega-3 fatty acids. As your brain repairs itself and grows new neurons, it needs an abundant supply of Omega-3 from your diet such as cold-water fish salmon and albacore tuna, canola oil, soybeans, walnuts, wheatgerm, eggs, and flaxseed oil.
2. Provide antioxidants to protect brain. Good sources of antioxidants include tea (especially green tea), blueberries and other berries, red grapes, tomatoes, broccoli, garlic, spinach, carrots, whole grains, and soy.
3. Offer high-tyrosine proteins to spark brain. Besides neurons, your brain also includes important chemicals called "neurotransmitters" - messengers that carry brain signals from one neuron to the next. You may have a great brain structure, but if your supply of the different neurotransmitters is insufficient your brain won't function properly. Some components of neurotransmitters, such as tryptophan, can't be made within the body but must be consumed directly from your diet. Others such as tyrosine can be made by the body but still require the right foods in your diet. The best neurotransmitter-building foods for boosting alertness, energy, and concentration include seafood, meat, eggs, soy and dairy products. To avoid sabotaging yourself, eat the low-fat, low salt varieties, e.g. lean cuts of meat or low-fat cottage cheese.
4. Supply water to hydrate brain. As you probably know, most of your body is water. It is very easy to not consume enough water and become dehydrated. Being even slightly dehydrated decreases your mental energy and can impair your memory. Drink at least three or four liters (quarts) of water a day.
5. Deliver vitamins and minerals. The most important vitamins for memory are Vitamins C, B12, and B6 and minerals: Iron (for women, especially) and Calcium. Deficiencies of either of these have been shown to impair learning. The best way to deliver most important vitamins and minerals is through a good diet, an easy way is to simply take a multivitamin, calcium and iron supplement each day. Make sure you always take your vitamins and minerals with food and not on an empty stomach. Not only will you avoid a stomach ache, but vitamins and minerals need to combine with food in your digestive system or they will be to a large degree wasted.
6. Present fiber. Fiber helps slow the absorption of sugar from your diet. Your brain operates 100% on sugar. But the trick is that the sugar must be delivered in a very steady stream and in the proper amount or your brain gets overwhelmed. Eating enough fiber slows your digestion and results in the sugar in your food being delivered into your bloodstream gradually. Foods containing healthy amounts of fiber include dried fruits, e.g. raisins, dates, prunes, and apricots, vegetables, e.g. green peas, broccoli, and spinach, peas and beans, e.g. black-eyed peas, lima beans, and kidney beans, nuts and seeds, e.g. flaxseed and almonds, whole fruit, e.g. apples with the skin, oranges, avocados, kiwi, and pears, and whole wheat grains, e.g. barley, brown rice, and the various whole wheat pastas and cereals.

Physical Activities

When you exercise your body, you exercise your brain. Regular exercise improves blood flow to the brain, and improved blood flow means - improved thinking and memory. Treating your body well can enhance your ability to process and recall information. Exercise may also enhance the effects of helpful brain chemicals and protect brain cells.

Appropriate sleep and relaxation time

1. Proper Sleep. When you’re sleep deprived, your brain can’t operate at full capacity. Creativity, problem-solving abilities, and critical thinking skills are compromised. Whether you’re studying, working, or trying to juggle life’s many demands, sleep deprivation is a recipe for disaster. Research shows that sleep is necessary for memory consolidation, with the key memory-enhancing activity occurring during the deepest stages of sleep. 1 to 3 years old child needs 12 to14 hours per day, 3 to 6 years old – 10 to 12 hours, 7 to 12 years old – 10 to 11 hours, and 12 to 18 years old needs 8 to 9 hours. http://www.webmd.com/parenting/guide/sleep-children 
2. Relaxation/Fun Time. When you think of ways to improve memory, do you think of “serious” activities such as doing crossword or mastering chess, or do more cheerful leisure like hanging out with friends, going for a walk or some fun places? Studies show that a life that’s full of friends and fun comes with cognitive benefits. 
3. Healthy relationships. Humans are highly social animals. We’re not meant to survive, let alone thrive, in isolation. Relationships stimulate our brains - in fact, interacting with others may be the best kind of brain exercise. Research shows that having meaningful relationships and a strong support system are vital not only to emotional health, but also to brain health. In a recent study from the Harvard School of Public Health, for example, researchers found that people with the most active social lives had the slowest rate of memory decline. There are many ways to start taking advantage of the brain and memory-boosting benefits of socializing. Participate in community events, sign your child to a class she/he likes or meet friends more often. And if it's not possible, don’t overlook the value of a pet - especially the highly-social dog.

    

1. Tons of Laughs. It is commonly known that laughter is the best medicine, and that holds true for the brain as well as the body. Unlike emotional responses, which are limited to specific areas of the brain, laughter engages multiple regions across the whole brain. Furthermore, listening to jokes and working out punch lines activates areas of the brain vital to learning and creativity.  A psychologist Daniel Goleman said “laughter…seems to help people think more broadly and associate more freely.” http://www.amazon.com/Emotional-Intelligence-Matter-More-Than/dp/055338371X That's what you can teach your child:

·      Laugh at yourself. Share your embarrassing moments. The best way to take ourselves less seriously is to talk about the times when we took ourselves too seriously.

·      Move toward laugh. When you hear laughter, seek it out and ask, “What’s funny?” Most of the time, people are happy to share something funny because it gives them an opportunity to laugh again.

·      Spend time with fun, playful people. These are people who laugh easily - both at themselves and at life’s absurdities - and who routinely find the humor in everyday events. Their playful point of view and laughter are contagious.

5. Limited stress. Stress is one of the brain’s worst enemies. Over time chronic stress destroys brain cells and damages the hippocampus, the region of the brain involved in the formation of new memories and the retrieval of old ones. In addition to stress, depression takes a heavy toll on the brain. In fact, some of the symptoms of depression include difficulty concentrating, making decisions, and remembering things. If you are mentally sluggish because of depression, seeking treatment will make a big difference in your cognitive abilities, including memory.

Brain’s Exercises

When growing, your brain is developing millions of neural pathways that help you process information quickly, solve familiar problems, and execute familiar tasks with a minimum of mental effort. But if you always stick to these well-worn paths, you aren’t giving your brain the stimulation it needs to keep growing and developing. You have to challenge your brain. Memory, like muscular strength, requires you to “use it or lose it.” The more you work out your brain, the better you’ll be able to process and remember information. The best brain exercising activities break your routine and challenge you to use and develop new brain pathways. The activity can be virtually anything, so long as it meets the following three criteria:

·      New. The activity needs to be something that’s unfamiliar and out of your comfort zone.

·      Challenging. Anything that takes some mental effort and expands your knowledge will work, e.g. learning a new language, instrument, or sport, or tackling a challenging crossword or Sudoku puzzle. http://www.superteacherworksheets.com/sudoku.html

·      Fun. Physical and emotional enjoyment is important in the brain’s learning process. The more interested and engaged you are in the activity, the more likely you’ll be to continue doing it and the greater the benefits you’ll experience. The activity should be challenging, fun and enjoyable. Make an activity more pleasurable by appealing to the senses - playing preferable music or rewarding a child afterwards with a favorite treat.

Use mnemonic devices to make memorization easier. Mnemonics are clues of any kind that help us remember something, usually by helping us associate the information we want to remember with a visual image, a sentence, or a word.

·      Visualize image. Associate a visual image with a word or name to help you remember them better. Positive, pleasant images that are vivid, colorful, and three-dimensional will be easier to remember, e.g. to remember the name Rosa Parks and what she’s known for, picture a woman sitting on a park bench surrounded by roses, waiting as her bus pulls up.

·      Create acrostic. Make up a sentence in which the first letter of each word is part of or represents the initial of what you want to remember, e.g. “Righty tidy lefty loose” to memorize the lines try to remember the notes R, T, L, L.

·      Form acronym. An acronym is a word that is made up by taking the first letters of all the key words or ideas you need to remember and creating a new word out of them, e.g. the word “TEAM” to support a better teamwork: Together Everyone Achieves More; “HOMES” to remember the names of the Great Lakes: Huron, Ontario, Michigan, Erie, and Superior, “FAMILY” – Father And Mother Interacting Lovingly Year-long; “F2F” – Face Two Face;  “SLAP” – Sounds Like A Plan, “KID” – Keep It Down; “PQ4R” -  Preview, Question, Read, Reflect, Recite, Review.

·      Make rhymes and alliteration. Rhymes, alliteration (a repeating sound or syllable), and even jokes are a memorable way to remember more mundane facts and figures, e.g. the rhyme “Thirty days hath September, April, June, and November” to remember the months of the year with only 30 days in them.

·      Create chunks. Chunking breaks a long list of numbers or other types of information into smaller, more manageable chunks, e.g. remembering a 10-digit phone number by breaking it down into three sets of numbers: 646-678-5039 (as opposed to 6466785039).

·      Use method of loci. Imagine placing the items you want to remember along a route you know well or in specific locations in a familiar room or building, e.g. for a shopping list, imagine bananas in the entryway to your home, a puddle of milk in the middle of the sofa, eggs going up the stairs, and bread on your bed.
      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Tips for enhancing the ability to learn and remember

1.    Pay attention. You can’t remember something if you never learned it, and you can’t learn something - that is, encode it into your brain - if you don’t pay enough attention to it. It takes about eight seconds of intense focus to process a piece of information into your memory. If you’re easily distracted, pick a quiet place where you won’t be interrupted.

2.    Involve as many senses as possible. Try to relate information to colors, textures, smells, and tastes. The physical act of rewriting information can help imprint it onto your brain. Even if you’re a visual learner, read out loud what you want to remember. If you can recite it rhythmically, even better.

3.    Relate information to what you already know. Connect new data to information you already remember, whether it’s new material that builds on previous knowledge, or something as simple as an address of someone who lives on a street where you already know someone. For more complex material, focus on understanding basic ideas rather than memorizing isolated details. Practice explaining the ideas to someone else in your own words.

4.    Rehearse information you've already learned. Review what you've learned the same day you learn it, and at intervals thereafter. This “spaced rehearsal” is more effective than cramming, especially for retaining what you've learned.

References
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/press-releases/2008-releases/active-social-life-delay-memory-loss-us-elderly.html
Yates, Frances. The Art of Memory. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1966
http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Memory-Frances-Yates/dp/0226950018
Foer , Joshua. Moonwalking with Einstein. Penguin Press HC, March 3, 2011
http://www.amazon.com/Moonwalking-Einstein-Remembering-Everything-ebook/dp/B004H4XI5O/ref=dp_kinw_strp_1
http://www.ted.com/talks/joshua_foer_feats_of_memory_anyone_can_do.html