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.
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Humans are the animals that manipulate their cognitive environment.
LBD: What is it?
Lewy Body Dementia is so called because the brains of affected people develop abnormal spherical masses of protein, called Lewy bodies, inside nerve cells. Lewy bodies are associated with Parkinson’s disease as well as dementia. Thus Lewy body dementia can refer to both Parkinson’s disease dementia and “dementia with Lewy bodies”. Lewy bodies are also often found in the brains of those with Alzheimer’s disease.
Unlike Alzheimer’s, however, dementia with Lewy bodies characteristically (but not invariably) begins with visual hallucinations.
If you have a numbered list to memorize, the best mnemonic strategy is the pegword mnemonic. This mnemonic uses numbers which have been transformed into visual images. Here's the standard 1-10 set.
I add two more:
Montessori education
Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an Italian physician. After working with retarded children in a psychiatric clinic attached to the University of Rome, she applied the ideas she had developed to children in a slum district in Rome. This was the first Casa dei Bambini ("children's house"). It opened in 1907. Two years later she set out her methods and principles in a book, which was translated as The Montessori Method in 1912.
We must believe that groups produce better results than individuals — why else do we have so many “teams” in the workplace, and so many meetings. But many of us also, of course, hold the opposite belief: that most meetings are a waste of time; that teams might be better for some tasks (and for other people!), but not for all tasks. So what do we know about the circumstances that make groups better value?
In the mid-seventies, Raugh and Atkinson had remarkable results using the keyword method to teach Russian vocabulary to college students. While later studies have not tended to find such dramatic results, nevertheless, a large number of studies have demonstrated an advantage in using the keyword mnemonic to learn vocabulary.
Some researchers have become huge fans of the strategy. Others have suggested a number of limitations. Let’s look at these.
A very common situation today, which is probably responsible for a great deal of modern anxiety about failing memory, is that where we're required to “multitask”, that trendy modern word for trying to do more than one thing at a time. It is a situation for which both the normal consequences of aging and low working memory capacity has serious implications.
Speed-reading techniques
Like many memory improvement courses, speed-reading programs tend to make inflated claims. Also like memory programs, most speed-reading programs proffer the same advice. In essence, speed-reading techniques involve the following components: