The Connection Between Attention, Memory and Learning
My son, Matt, uses this simple trick to keep track of his cell phone: Whenever he puts it down, he taps it three times; the tapping focuses his attention just long enough for the location of his phone to register in his memory.For Students (And All of Us!) The First Priority Must Be Sleep
In a Pentagon brainstorming session, Brigadier General Rhonda Cornum described her approach to life in one word: Prioritize.
You gotta love her method:
- “A”
- “B”
- “C”
- “Discard ‘C’”
(Martin Seligman’s wonderful book, Flourish, is full of these kinds of nuggets.)
Research keeps pouring out about the importance of sleep. Inadequate sleep is implicated in anxiety, depression, other emotional disorders, attention issues, unhealthy weight gain and poor cognition.
And sleep is essential to learning, because the material we learn during the day needs to be processed during sleep. All that studying is counter-productive if students are staying up too late to then “sleep on it” and let the information sink in.
This is the most hectic, fragmented, high-pressure time of the school year, and I know we all feel pulled in a million directions. But Mother Nature doesn’t care about all our ambitions; she still insists that the #1 Priority must be sleep.
Here are a few suggestions for making enough sleep happen:
- Get homework done immediately upon arriving home. Don’t take a break first; just dive right in and plow through and save the break for evening.
- Look for small bits of time during the day to get started on studying; even those two minutes before class begins can be used to begin reading an assignment, thinking about a paper topic, start a math problem (you need not finish it right then and there), etc.
- No electronics in the bedroom. Keep them downstairs.
- Set a bedtime that allows at least 8 hours of sleep (and really really really it ought to be 9+ hours for students), then reverse-engineer the day to make sleep the top priority. Some favorite activities simply will not fit into the daily schedule; save them for summer.
- No glowing screens after 10 PM (or whatever is one hour before bedtime). The light from computers, TVs and smart phones disrupts sleep.
- Review flash cards, vocab words, etc, before bed: You’ll wake up remembering them better!
- Read something relaxing and/or boring in bed before you go to sleep.
- Record your favorite shows and look forward to watching them this summer. DO NOT watch exciting TV …
12 Days of Happiness
Happy Holidays, Everyone!
I purposely waited until December 26 to make this post, figuring that this week between Christmas and New Years might be the perfect time to present my little gift to you.
I love TED talks; I watch them often, I show them in my classes, and I routinely share them with loved ones and students.
There are a number of TED talks that have, without exaggeration, profoundly and permanently changed my own life for the better.
I’ve Told My Kid 1000 Times!!!
Why don’t kids take our good advice? Why don’t they do the things we suggest, things that would obviously help them?
Why don’t they listen to us?
Along with academic tutoring and test preparation, I teach study skills: how to study for a biology test, how to write a term paper, how to learn vocabulary words.
Parents are eager for these lessons, and also jaded.
- He knows this stuff already.
- Her teachers repeated this over and over all last year.
- I’ve already told him a thousand times!!!
My Oh-So-Simple Approach to Stress Relief
Get rid of the thing that is causing the stress.
Does this sound unrealistic? Impossible?
When my kids were growing up, we had a big house with an acre of lawn and an in-ground swimming pool. We enjoyed the space and made good use of the pool. Even so, that big spread was a lot to afford and a lot take care of.
I spent a lot of stressful hours, many of them sleepless early-morning ones, fretting over maintenance issues and bills. Paying the cleaning lady, the lawn guy and the pool guy meant I had to work more hours. Letting those folks go and doing the work myself meant spending tons of time doing chores I did not enjoy and couldn’t keep up with.
Is There a Goal to the Psychoanalytic Process?
[I'm devoting my Sunday blog posts to the topic of Learning Through Experience. This will very often mean Learning From Mistakes, and talking about mistakes and errors in general, including my own. It will also include the reflecting upon and valuing of all sorts of experiences.]
When I think “psychoanalysis,” my mind conjures a Woody-Allenesque caricature of a “neurotic” patient spending decades of his life lying on his analyst’s couch, endlessly rehashing every real or imagined detail of his childhood, in a fruitless internal quest for The Answer to his psychological distress.
Invest In Experiences; They’re More Satisfying
I’m going to try devoting my Sunday blog posts to the topic of Learning Through Experience. This will very often mean Learning From Mistakes, and talking about mistakes and errors in general, including my own.
I must be a really odd person, because every month, as I pay my credit card bills, I don’t, actually, feel too bad.
In fact, I mostly feel pleased and satisfied.
Forgiveness and Radical Acceptance
Everyone in the mental health community is applauding Marsha Lineham for her brave revelation that she, herself, used to have BPD, and that she created her Dialectical Behavior Therapy in large part as an answer to her own needs.
Radical Acceptance is an important component of DBT. It means accepting oneself and accepting all of one’s emotions, even the powerful, painful, terrifying ones.
It’s not the same as being helpless and resigned to one’s negative feelings. Radical Acceptance says that Step One is facing emotions, experiencing them, seeing them clearly and thereby gaining perspective.
Forgiveness: Try Not to Build a Neverland
Nat writes:
…if someone hurts you in a way that you would never hurt anyone else, how you do stop yourself from mentally adding ‘but I would never do what they did’?
Forgiveness is a thing you do for yourself, because you ideally wish for your internal landscape to be as free and open and unencumbered as possible.
Every hurt or grudge you hold onto is like putting a wall around a patch of your own internal emotional terrain. You gain security but you sacrifice emotional acreage. You become less open, less generous, less available, less free. Your world becomes smaller.
Why Do Relationships Fail?
Here comes an example of why learning and science are my life’s passions.
Because wait long enough, and some amazingly smart and dedicated researcher might come up with a break-through that changes your life.
Maybe it’s medical. Maybe technological.
Or, as the field of neuroscience advances, the light bulb that clicks on is more and more often psychological.
OK, soooo…..
Why do relationships fail?
