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How can I improve my handwriting and other psychomotor tasks?

January 18, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Try caffeine (coffee!).


Hum Mov Sci. 2006 Oct;25(4-5):523-35.

The effect of caffeine on handwriting movements in skilled writers.

Tucha O, Walitza S, Mecklinger L, Stasik D, Sontag TA, Lange KW.

Abstract

In laboratory tasks, caffeine has been shown to improve psychomotor performance. The aim of the present experiment was to assess the effects of caffeine on a skilled everyday life task in habitual caffeine consumers. The assessment of handwriting movements of 20 adults was performed following the administration of 0mg/kg (placebo), 1.5mg/kg, 3.0mg/kg or 4.5mg/kg of caffeine. A digitising tablet was used for the assessment of fine motor movements. Participants were asked to perform a simple writing task. Kinematic analysis of handwriting movements showed that, in comparison to placebo administration, high doses of caffeine (i.e., 4.5mg/kg) can produce improvements in handwriting as indicated by more fluent handwriting movements as well as an increase in maximum velocity and maximum positive and negative accelerations. The results suggest that higher doses of caffeine can enhance psychomotor performance.

Filed Under: cognitive, cognitive performance, improve handwriting, improve psychomotor skills Tagged With: , , ,

How can I make better decisions?

January 13, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Get enough sleep.

Chronobiol Int. 2012 Feb;29(1):43-54.

Gambling when sleep deprived: don’t bet on stimulants.

Killgore WD, Grugle NL, Balkin TJ.

Abstract

Recent evidence suggests that sleep deprivation leads to suboptimal decision-making on the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), a pattern that appears to be unaffected by moderate doses of caffeine. It is not known whether impaired decision-making could be reversed by higher doses of caffeine or by other stimulant countermeasures, such as dextroamphetamine or modafinil. Fifty-four diurnally active healthy subjects completed alternate versions of the IGT at rested baseline, at 23 and 46 h awake, and following a night of recovery sleep. After 44 h awake, participants received a double-blind dose of caffeine (600 mg), dextroamphetamine (20 mg), modafinil (400 mg), or placebo. At baseline, participants showed a normal pattern of advantageous performance, whereas both sleep-deprived sessions were associated with suboptimal decision-making on the IGT. Following stimulant administration on the second night of sleep deprivation, groups receiving caffeine, dextroamphetamine, or modafinil showed significant reduction in subjective sleepiness and improvement in psychomotor vigilance, but decision-making on the IGT remained impaired for all stimulants and did not differ from placebo. Decision-making returned to normal following recovery sleep. These findings are consistent with prior research showing that sleep deprivation leads to suboptimal decision-making on some types of tasks, particularly those that rely heavily on emotion processing regions of the brain, such as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Moreover, the deficits in decision-making were not reversed by commonly used stimulant countermeasures, despite restoration of psychomotor vigilance and alertness. These three stimulants may restore some, but not all, aspects of cognitive functioning during sleep deprivation.

Here is an article in Scientific American  describing a similar finding:

Short on sleep, the brain optimistically favors long odds

Read the original scientifuc article:

Sleep Deprivation Biases the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Economic Preferences

Filed Under: cognitive, cognitive performance, how to make better decisions, improving problem-solving / decision-making skills Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How can I sharpen my brain?

December 21, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Do these simple brain-training activities. Work out which ones you feel weak in; practice those again and again until you get good.

  1. Write neatly but quickly.
  2. Work out how to tell an interesting anecdote in under two minutes.
  3. “Do consequences”— predicting possible positive and negative consequences arising from various actions.
  4. Spot logical inconsistencies in a statement or someone’s behavior.
  5. Follow long, complicated sentences.
  6. Make accurate, complicated decisions that involve weighing up several options in your head.
  7. Remember complicated instructions.
  8. Follow a complicated movie story line.
  9. Block out distractions when you’re trying to do something hard.
  10. Remember something when distracting new information arrives straight after you receive it.
  11. Follow a conversation with lots of background noise.
  12. Follow a conversation with someone with a difficult-to-understand accent or poor English.
  13. Express complicated ideas that you’ve just read into your own words.
  14. Think and talk at the same time.
  15. Listen and think at the same time.
  16. Eat and listen at the same time.
  17. Recognize situations that call for tact before you respond.
  18. Silently pronounce hard-to-pronounce words as you read e.g. proprioceptive, neurotrophins, neurobics.
  19. Pronounce  hard-to-pronounce words out loud.
  20. Think up effective strategies for solving problems.
  21. See through a plan to completion.
  22. Reflect what you’ve said and done and spotting better ways of doing things next time.
  23. Set plans and goals.
  24. Spot the main point--the central thesis– of what someone has said or what’s happening.
  25. Consider all the relevant information and not getting swayed by just a few bits of information.
  26. Deep-learn the meaning of new words.
  27. “See” by touching–practicing doing simple activities with your eyes shut.

    Brain Exercise-which ones are neurobic?

  28. Recognize objects by feel.
  29. Play “what’s that sound?” games.
  30. Identify ambiguous pictures.
  31. Identify familiar faces when hair and other non-facial cues are removed.
  32. Say tongue-twisters.When even just reading tongue-twisters silently, the brain has to work extra-hard and extra bits of the brain light up, as shown in this research:
    Brain imaging of tongue-twister sentence comprehension: Twisting the tongue and the brain

    Visit this site that lists over 400 English tongue twisters to compile your own list of especially tricky ones. It turns out I have trouble saying “cricket critics” and “bed-bugs’ black  blood” and “sniff sesh!” and ” “click, clap, pluck” and lots of others!  But I can say them better now!

  33. Articulate the words quickly and clearly when singing.
  34. Read a map.
  35. Flip shapes in your head.
  36. Identify a shape when it’s been flipped.
  37. Visualize a couple of moves ahead in strategy games like chess and checkers.
  38. Sort items into categories. (I should sort these 50 items into categories!)
  39. Anticipate where the ball will go in  ball games  such as tennis.
  40. Vividly imagine different sounds and images and tastes and smells.
  41. Do complicated imagery such as rearranging the room furniture in your head.
  42. Vividly imagine all the different emotions e.g. feeling determined, ecstatic, discouraged, alert, etc.
  43. Reproduce/recognizing  complicated geometrical figures from memory.
  44. Coordinate a complicated cooking task involving preparing several dishes at once.
  45. Do challenging sums in your head.
  46. Process your listener’s non-verbal behavior.
  47. Accurately identify other people’s non-verbal behavior.
  48. Accurately read other people’s facial expressions.
  49. Accurately pick up other people’s feelings (i.e. showing accurate felt empathy).
  50. Use your non-dominant hand to do simple tasks.

Wow! That’s a lot of basic brain skills to master! But, apparently it’s do-able, so it’s worth exploring!

We wouldn’t be weak in all these things — just on a few of them. We need to find out what we’re weak at, and to find exercises to strengthen those weaknesses. I am hopeless at spatial stuff and recognising faces and thinking while talking!

Free, fun,challenging skill-building materials for most of these activities already exist. I’ll add in the links later.

Filed Under: cognitive, cognitive performance, doing brain-training exercises, growing the brain intentionally Tagged With: , ,

What are some practical memory strategies I can apply to real-life situations?

December 14, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Here is a collection of tips that other people have said work for them:

from How to Memorize Anything You Want

Aaron says:

For remembering names, my favorite technique is to match the name to a defining characteristic of the person with the same name. Some of the ones I’ve used:“Matt is massive” (he was like 6 foot 4, 275 lbs)“Kevin is kind” (he really was a nice guy, and it stood out.) When you look at the person it’s fairly easy to recall an attribute, harder to recall a name.

Michael says:
I had similar problems when I first started out many moons ago in the anatomy lab. I used the anagram technique for big lists and created a rolling story out of those acronyms. Started at the feet and as the story progressed I moved up the body.

For neural pathways I adopted coloured pins. If we were in the labs and were identifying segments of cadavers I would use a certain coloured pin. When studying from textbooks i would use the same coloured felt tipped marker and underline words with that. I use repitition for lists as an independant check and write them out over and over until I can remember them off the top of my head, in the same colour as the pins used on the cadavers.

I also learned some tools from Psych elements of my degree. One was taste recognition. I attempted to study using this technique, and one example the Prof. used was alcohol as it is very easy to remember the taste of certain liquors just by thinking about them. My room mate was a bartender so I used the alcohol example to study for his exam. Everytime I wrote a list in a coloured pen, I had a sip of a certain alcohol with the same colour. Blue pen – blue curaco, black pen – black sambucca, green pen – midori. Had to be careful not to get drunk, but after two nights of study (cram sessions as Psych was the least of my priorities for the degree) I ended up topping the class of 130. I told the Prof about the study technique – he was happy that I used Psychology to study his course, but wasn’t too impressed that I was drinking to remember his work.

Blake says:

One good trick I’ve learned is using colored flashcards and colored pens. The visualization of color helps me out a lot. Another good method is teaching others. If you have a study group, teaching other people the material actually helps you out to because you memorize it even further.

Mike says:

[Ron White (memory master)] uses people to represent numbers so I’ve assigned numbers to friends and when I have to remember a new number, I picture my friends in the appropriate order.

Bruce says:

I rely on a pocket notebook and my Blackberry to write down things for accuracy rather than rely on memory although I am not sure if I would be better off relying on my mental abilities alone.

In her book Now You See It Kathy Davidson says:

A friend of mine has cultivated the habit of always putting her watch on the wrong wrist when she wants to remind herself later to remember something. She says when she gets home from the office and goes to take off the watch, that moment of awareness that the watch is on the wrong wrist forces her to think, “What was it that was so important today that I was sure I would forget it later and changed my watch to remind me?” (p 17)

Everyday challenges:

1.  remembering bank account number and other passwords and numbers

2.  telephone numbers

3.  key points of something you’ve read

4.  people’s names

5. names of  hard-to-pronounce places, people and things

Filed Under: cognitive, cognitive performance, improving learning and memory skills, practical memory strategies Tagged With: , ,

How canI generate good ideas?

December 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer:  Connect more!

Steven Johnson explains:

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How can I solve problems better?

December 10, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Define the problem precisely; then hand it over to your unconscious to solve.

As most of us know from experience, if we concentrate too intensively on a tough problem, we can get stuck in a mental rut. Our thinking narrows, and we struggle vainly to come up with new ideas. But if we let the problem sit unattended for a time–if we “sleep on it”–we often return to it with a fresh perspective and a burst of creativity. Research by Ap Dijksterhuis, a Dutch psychologist who heads the Unconscious Lab at Radboud University in Nijmegen, indicates that such breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions, his experiments reveal, if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. But Dijksterhuis’s work also show that our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem. “If we don’t have a particular intellectual goal in mind, Dijksterhuis writes, “unconscious thought does not occur.” (p 119, The Shallows, by Nicholas Carr)

More thoughts from Dijksterhuis himself:

One could say that
unconscious thought is more ‘‘liberal’’ than conscious thought and leads to the generation of
items or ideas that are less obvious, less accessible and more creative. Upon being confronted with
a task that requires a certain degree of creativity, it pays off to delegate the labor of thinking to the
unconscious mind. (p 145, Where creativity resides: The generative power
of unconscious thought by Ap Dijksterhuis and  Teun Meurs)

Science 311, 1005 (2006)

On Making the Right Choice: The Deliberation-Without-Attention Effect

Ap Dijksterhuis,* Maarten W. Bos, Loran F. Nordgren, Rick B. van Baaren
Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is not always advantageous to engage in thorough conscious
deliberation before choosing. On the basis of recent insights into the characteristics of conscious
and unconscious thought, we tested the hypothesis that simple choices (such as between different
towels or different sets of oven mitts) indeed produce better results after conscious thought, but
that choices in complex matters (such as between different houses or different cars) should be left
to unconscious thought. Named the ‘‘deliberation-without-attention’’ hypothesis, it was confirmed
in four studies on consumer choice, both in the laboratory as well as among actual shoppers, that
purchases of complex products were viewed more favorably when decisions had been made in the
absence of attentive deliberation.

An excellent review by Dijksterhuis et al on the superiority of the unconscious mind for making complex decisions:

The rational unconscious: Conscious versus unconscious thought in complex consumer choice

Filed Under: cognitive, cognitive performance, how can I solve problems creatively, improving creativity skills

How can I grow my aging hippocampus?

December 9, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer. Exercise!

Exercise training increases size of hippocampus and improves memory

Kirk I. Erickson, et al

Abstract

The hippocampus shrinks in late adulthood, leading to impaired memory and increased risk for dementia. Hippocampal and medial temporal lobe volumes are larger in higher-fit adults, and physical activity training increases hippocampal perfusion, but the extent to which aerobic exercise training can modify hippocampal volume in late adulthood remains unknown. Here we show, in a randomized controlled trial with 120 older adults, that aerobic exercise training increases the size of the anterior hippocampus, leading to improvements in spatial memory. Exercise training increased hippocampal volume by 2%, effectively reversing age-related loss in volume by 1 to 2 y. We also demonstrate that increased hippocampal volume is associated with greater serum levels of BDNF, a mediator of neurogenesis in the dentate gyrus. Hippocampal volume declined in the control group, but higher preintervention fitness partially attenuated the decline, suggesting that fitness protects against volume loss. Caudate nucleus and thalamus volumes were unaffected by the intervention. These theoretically important findings indicate that aerobic exercise training is effective at reversing hippocampal volume loss in late adulthood, which is accompanied by improved memory function.

This  article explains the results in more detail:

Train your Muscles, Embiggen your Hippocampus

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How can I make better decisions?

November 15, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Answer: Conduct a “premortem” just before you decide to go ahead with an important decision.

 


Gary Klein, author of  Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, thought up the premortem idea. He spells out why and how to do a premortem in this Harvard Business Review article:

Performing a Project Premortem


Daniel Kahneman glowingly describes the premortem technique in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He writes:

“The procedure is simple: When the organization has almost come to an important decision but has not formally committed itself, Klein proposes gathering for a brief session a group of individuals who are knowledgeable about the decision.

The premise of the session is a short speech:

‘Imagine that we are a year into the future. We implemented the plan as it now exists The outcome was a disaster. Please take 5 to 10 minutes to write a brief history of that disaster.’

Gary Klein’s idea of the premortem usually evokes immediate enthusiasm. After I described it casually at a session in Davos, someone behind me muttered, “It was worth coming to Davos just for this!” (I later noticed the speaker was the CEO of a major international corporation.)

The premortem has two main advantages: it overcomes the groupthink that affects many teams once a decision  appears to be made, and it unleashes the imagination of knowledgeable individuals in a much needed direction. . .The main virtue of the premortem is that is legitimizes doubts.  Furthermore, it encourages even supporters of the decision to search for possible threats that they had not considered earlier.” (p 264-5)

Kahneman again explains the technique  in this video–watch from 12 minutes 17 seconds:

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Logic fallacies explained: Ad hominem or attacking the person

November 11, 2011 by Leave a Comment

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