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Some comments on the commonalities between the Suzuki approach to learning music and the Montessori approach to education.

My sons have both been in Montessori since they were three (they are now 8 and nearly 11, respectively). My elder son started learning the violin from a Suzuki teacher when he was around five, and now learns the piano (again, from a Suzuki teacher). My younger son has been learning the violin for the last two years. Over the years I have been somewhat intrigued by the number of parents who, like me, are both Montessori and Suzuki parents.

I recently read an interesting article in the Smithsonian about procrastination and why it’s good for you. Frank Partnoy, author of a new book on the subject, pointed out that procrastination only began to be regarded as a bad thing by the Puritans — earlier (among the Greeks and Romans, for example), it was regarded more as a sign of wisdom.

Distributed practice more effective than massed practice

It has long been known that spacing practice (reviewing learning or practicing a skill at spaced intervals) is far more effective than massed practice (in one heavy session). An interesting example of this comes from a study that aimed to find the best way of teaching postmen to type (this was at the request of the British Post Office). The researchers put postmen on one of four schedules:

As we all know, rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here's a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.

Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain. However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.

Subliminal learning achieved notoriety back in 1957, when James Vicary claimed moviegoers could be induced to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola through the use of messages that flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen. The claim was later shown to be false, but though the idea that people can be brainwashed by the use of such techniques has been disproven (there was quite a bit of hysteria about the notion at the time), that doesn’t mean the idea of subliminal learning is crazy.

Knowing a number of effective strategies for reading and note-taking, practicing and memorizing, is vital, but it's not the whole story. There is also a category of strategies we might term 'support' strategies. These include strategies aimed at setting goals, managing time and effort, and monitoring your performance and progress. In study, these come under the concept of self-regulation, which is related to the more general concept of metamemory.

A New Yorker cartoon has a man telling his glum wife, “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel.” There are a number of reasons you might find that funny, but the point here is that it is very difficult to follow all the layers. This is a sentence in which mental attributions are made to the 6^th level, and this is just about impossible for us to follow without writing it down and/or breaking it down into chunks.

"I'm terrible at remembering names"

"I'm great with names, but I'm hopeless at remembering what I've read."

"I always remember what people tell me about themselves, but I'm always forgetting birthdays and anniversaries."

There is no such thing as a poor memory!

There will be memory domains that you are less skilled at dealing with.

Information comes in different packages

Think about the different types of information you have stored in your memory:

Genes

Several genes have been implicated in Alzheimer's, but the big one is the e4 allele of the ApoE gene (on chromosome 19). This variant is found in about a quarter of the population.

Having it doesn't mean you are foreordained to develop Alzheimer's, but it certainly increases the risk substantially. The risk goes up considerably more if both of your genes are the e4 variant (remember you inherit two: one from each parent).

Research; study; learning; solving problems; making decisions — all these, to be done effectively and efficiently, depend on asking the right questions. Much of the time, however, people let others frame the questions, not realizing how much this shapes how they think.