Posted on 18-04-2008
Distractions Hurt Your Brain
Filed Under (Self Improvement) by admin

You may have guessed it but reading the evidence gives folks the shakes.
The average U.S. teenager spends 6 ½ hours daily listening to music,
messaging his/her friends, viewing TV, playing videos-games and surfing the web.

Add the recent research students daydream 30% of their waking hours, and
it is hard not to wonder how they are going to graduate and survive on their own.

Fact: multitasking and a noisy environment really hurt your 3-pound coconut.

Sure, kids can learn with blasting sound tracks in the background, but the
information they acquire flitters away in 24 hours. Later, when students
want to use the knowledge or are tested, only a wispy ghost remains.

Google: Professor Russell A. Poldrack, UCLA, published 7.25.06, Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences.

How Your Brain Learns

You mind retains emotional experiences up to a lifetime. Remember your first
day at school and the bully in the school yard? How about graduating from
elementary school, the feel of your diploma and the ice cream party afterward?

Two Ways to Learn

Just relax and let this sink in, there is no quickie test later.

Declaratory learning is snapping up information you can later bring to mind and talk about. What state did George Washington live in, his wife’s name and what were his false teeth made of? Once you know the answers you can retrieve the knowledge at will forever.

Declaratory learning is separated into Episodic and Semantic memories.
Episodic includes the events, times, places and emotional associations based on
your experiences. If a dog in the park bit you when you were age 6, the experience
is still encoded in your amygdala and hippocampus as a neural network fifty-years later.

Let a strange mutt get to close to you decades later, and you feel a frisson, quake and shudder pass through your body in fear. You relive the old dog experience in your mind’s eye and feel the same sense of fear and anticipate pain.

Semantic Memory

Meanings, explanations and understandings often stick like crazy glue in your mind.
Your 3rd grade teacher, Mrs. Harrison, said, Class, the slower you read, the better your comprehension and recall. Supercilious, she said, means arrogant and bossy.

It comes from Latin, meaning raised eyebrows. She was totally wrong about reading
slower for better concentration and recall, and totally right about the word, supercilious.

Last One – Habit (Striatum) and Procedural Memory

This is non-verbal learning like riding a bike, your car and later, typing.
Once you master the skill, you own it for life. Motor learning is also called
right-hemisphere knowledge because it is based on Pattern-Recognition and
Spatial Skills.

Eyes-Only: for The Smartest Cookies in the Box

Declaratory memory is under the control of your hippocampus, related Temporal
lobe, Enterhinal and Perihinal cortices. You use your conscious mind to dreg up
declaratory memories from where they are encoded.

Habit a/k/a Striatum memory (driving the car) is encoded non-consciously and
operates on auto-pilot like your breathing, respiration and blood circulation.
If you are hunting for it look to your basal ganglia, part of your brainstem.

Your Cerebellum (little brain) is also involved in sensory perception and motor output. It integrates your language fluency, emotions, memory retrieval, and cognitive skills. It is a relay structure and pulls pieces together from difference
brain structures.

Question: What the difference between STM (Short-Term-Memory) and LTM
(Long-Term Memory)?

Answer: past 30 seconds.

Example

Learning a telephone number can be retained in two-ways, memorize it by over-learning it. Keep testing yourself (spaced repetition) and it becomes locked into your PreFrontal Cortex.

Second, beat it into your coconut and when you pick up a telephone it appears as
if by magic and your fingers punch it in. Habit learning is not as
flexible as Procedural learning; procedural is conscious, while habit is at a deep non-conscious level. We chunk (divide) the telephone number (not 5165446210, but 516-544-6210) for ease of retrieval. Knowing that is Semantic knowledge.

Secret

Declaratory and Habit (Striatum) are competitors and when the student or adult
is distracted, habit learning prevails because it non-conscious and on auto-pilot.

Is there a place for habit as well as declaratory memory, of course.
Google: Peg System and Link System for memory improvement.

How Our Eyes See Words

Up to September 2007, the prevailing scientific view of our eye movements was,
both work in tandem. Not so. The operative word is Fusion. Your left eye sees
different letters of the word you are looking at, than your right eye.

We are almost like the critters with eyes on the sides of their heads; their left eye reports on a different scene than their right eye. In fact they have a wider
view than we do by blending both horizontal visions.

Processing Information

International learning experts agreed human eyes processed words while reading, identically and simultaneously. N.G. Your eyes do not see the same thing while reading, they have division of labor instead of redundancy, and then consolidate their efforts using a brain thing called Fusion.

We read with irregular eye movements, jerking and jolting along the sentence.
There is a name to remember for everything, right? It is called Saccades, from
a French word meaning sack, and pronounced Sah-card.

Discovering Fusion of eye movements in reading was Professor Simon Liversedge,
University of Southampton, U.K., and published by The British Association for
the Advancement of Science. 9.11.07

So what

Experts are closer to figuring out how the brain processes sentences. The difference is only two letters apart but it forwards a different picture to the brain. This new information helps with remedial treatments of folks with dyslexia; how doctors retrain patients with eye traumas, and lastly, to enhance speed-reading.

Endwords

People who best understand eye movements are at the University of Houston,
College of Optometry, and Pacific University College of Optometry.

Both universities have published scientific results on the benefits of speed reading. They maintain visual-span is the bottleneck on reading speed and that bottleneck can be improved through proper training. Ask us how.

See ya

copyright 2007
H. Bernard Wechsler
www.speedlearning.org hbw@speedlearning.org
——————————————————————————————————

Author of Speed Learning for Professionals, published by Barron’s; partner of
Evelyn Wood, creator of speed reading, graduating two million, including the
White House staffs of four U.S. Presidents.

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal and fortune Magazine for major articles.

http://www.speedlearning.org
hbw@speedlearning.org

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