Several video game and software manufacturers have released memory improvement games that are aimed at improving memory and cognitive function. However, as with any other product that’s being advertised, it’s only natural to wonder if the advertised claims are true, and whether these games actually work. The short answer is “yes” – memory training through games does work.

The human brain works in a somewhat complicated manner, but at its simplest terms, it comes down to this: you either use it or lose it. For instance, if you go for a long time without practicing your addition skills, the next time you attempt to add figures, it will seem much harder. The principle behind memory games is that if you keep your brain active, recalling information will be easy. Performing everyday tasks doesn’t keep your brain active because only a few parts of your brain are strengthened. For instance, being a cab driver mainly exercises the hippocampus, which is the part of the brain that is responsible for sense of direction.

Research shows that memory games have the ability to delay memory loss even in old age. This is due a certain special characteristic of the brain which is known as “neuroplasticity.” Neuroplasticity simply refers to the ability of the brain to build new brain neurons as a result of brain training. This proves that even if you weren’t born with a good memory, you can easily improve your memory through the use of memory training games. In fact, the risk of developing Alzheimer’s, Dementia and other degenerative disorders is greatly reduced by this exercise.

In order to enjoy the full benefit of memory training, you need to ensure that you are using the right games. Such games are available online and also as part of comprehensive memory improvement programs such as Ultimate Memory. Needless to say, a comprehensive memory improvement program is a lot more beneficial than a stand-alone game. It should be scientifically designed to target over 8 different areas of the brain, improving all aspects of memory including spatial memory, sense of direction, and memory for names and faces.

While memory improvement games do boost memory, you need to play these games for at least 10 minutes each day in order to keep your brain alert. Initially it will take about 2 weeks for you to notice a significant change in your memory. However, this is not to say that you should stop training after the first two weeks. You have to keep training your memory because as soon as you stop training your memory will start to deteriorate again, just as your muscles lose their shape when you stop exercising. Keep your brain in top shape with memory games and software, and you’ll stay fit for a long time.

Soon to have your first day of college? Nothing to be afraid of, although it can be perceived as somewhat tantalizing at first, it will become easier once you get a hold of it.

Here’s a few advice & tips on tackling college & university studies.

Be mentally prepared

Don’t come to a knife battle with a gun… or was it the other way around? Either way, be prepared before you ever set foot on campus. Your mindset should be ready. Your attitude should be one soaked in vigilance. Make sure you take notes as much as possible during the first few days. Make a note of where you can find the library, the student office and all other relevant buildings.

Also, have a strong sense of purpose in your studies. Why are you giving up your time to attend lectures? Don’t enter into the game in a heedless state, have a game plan. Few students actually do.

Be physically prepared

Well, I’ve covered this earlier in a post entitled What to Bring To College. In short, what the post says is that you need to have in your possession all of the things that are necessary (the indispensables) as well as some other things that will embellish the college experience. Look into that as soon as possible. No need to start stressing out a week before the big date.

Become a learner, not a student

Being a student is kind of an occupation. You roam around campus doing what you’re told. The leach is your textbooks and the supervisors are your professors. This is how most students I know tend to view their academic institutions. It’s not a very helpful attitude. You are there to learn, to get information that is hopefully somewhat useful in life. This is how you ought to view this experience, with a proclivity towards learning. Education is a life long pursuit, your college days are merely one type of approach in relations to this journey.

In closing, be prepared to learn, understand what you are learning and go out and learn!

Study Smarter – Not Harder

You’ve probably heard this phrase on numerous occasion. A worn out cliche, we ought to study smarter and not harder. But what does this exactly mean? This post will attempt to answer that question.

1 Effectiveness

You could say that the phrase study smarter is similar to the phrase study efficiently. The more effective you are in studying, more get’s done and less time is wasted. Before you can go about changing this and becoming a more efficient student you need to be aware of your current effectiveness. This has to be measured before we can improve it, the reason is fairly obvious. IF you do not know where you stand, how will you know how far you’ve went?

A simple of doing this would be to measure a typical study week. You could measure how much things you’ve got down, how many problems you’ve solved or how many pages you’ve read and then combine those and similar figures into averages. Then do this every week. The result will be a chart or a graph that shows you how effective you are and whether or not you’ve improved over time or not.

2 Find what works best – then do just that!

Economists have a term they’ve dubbed ROI or Return of Investment to measure how much value an investment yields compared to invested capital. You need to have a similar mindset towards your studies. What particular method of studying has harnessed the greatest results in your case when you compare it to the energy you’ve put in? For instance, if you were to read about a subject or discuss a subject for 1 hour, which one would yield the most results? You need to measure these things now, otherwise you might be wasting time that could have been spent doing other things.

That’s all for today folks, don’t forget to take a look at our very own guide for studying. Until next time, have a pleasant day!

Tutor Finder – How To Find Tutors

Don’t be afraid to ask when you do not know, we all need help every now and then. There are many myths about tutoring and hiring tutors which is why I think it is important to clear the myths and tell it like it is. This post will attempt to do just that, a starting point towards finding yourself a tutor.

Should I get a tutor?

How do you know if you need to find a tutor for yourself or for someone else? Well, it depends. There are number of different factors that we need to consider, mainly:

These questions are essential and should be dealt with prior to hiring any tutor. You need to first establish the need for tutorship, then measure its effectiveness and finally make a rather crude estimation on how much all of this will cost you. Plan and ahead so you don’t fall on your head.

What will happen if you don’t hire a tutor?

You can’t tell for sure of course but you can get an idea of how much you’re in need of it. If you’re close to flunking a course and you have no clue on how to tackle the matter at hand it maybe that finding a tutor is critical. In this case it’s very important that you keep your options open and perhaps consider full time tutoring as a necessary option as opposed to a voluntary one.

However it may not be the case that you’re at the verge of failing but nevertheless feel inclined towards getting a tutor. In this case you need to establish how effective tutoring will be and whether or not it is worth your time and money. In the previous case this wasn’t much of an issue since you saw few other options. This brings us to our second point.

How effective is tutoring?

The effectiveness of tutoring depends not only on the tutor but also on the one being tutored. It may be that you prefer to learn in a environment where you are not the only one being thought such as inside a normal classroom or as many others you flourish once you get a one on one session with an experienced tutor. Make sure you establish what type of learner you are before you make any decisions. As for the tutor, some people are simply better teachers than others and so you will benefit more if you join their classes as opposed to someone else’s.

Always evaluate a tutor before you decide to hire that person. Is the tutor effective, can they show you any tangible results in respect to the students they’ve tutored? If not perhaps you should move on to someone else. Also, you can ask the students they’ve tutored previously or those who are currently being tutored whether or not they would recommend that person. There are lots of tutoring services to help you out with this search but make sure you look around before you make your final decision.

What are the costs of tutoring?

It obviously depends on
a) The tutor b) The number of hours you wish to be tutored
As stated previously, make sure you know all the options that are available. The bigger the sample, the greater the likelihood that you will find a tutor who is not only good but also cost effective. As for the number of hours, this depends on how much help you need.

If you truly want your tutoring sessions to be as effective as possible you need to prepare before you meet up. Make sure you are already well versed with all the terminology, definitions and what not. You do NOT want to spend half your time having the tutor explain to you things you could have understood yourself. This is a common mistake!

Finally, don’t go all in without first feeling the water with your feet. Try it for a week or two and see if it works out. Once you feel comfortable studying with this tutor you can decide on proceeding to more regular meetings, for instance 1-5 times a week (or more depending on your situation). In conclusion, to find a tutor you need to see all the options, make sure your desired tutor is up for the job and then evaluate their performance before you go all in.

Be a baby, or learn like a baby? (an article by baby videos)

We live in a day and age where we as human beings try to find out how we can maximize our learning capabilities in order to stay relevant on the market. At this very moment, there are thousands of ambitious minds surfing the web trying to find information on how to learn effectively.

The irony of this is that learning is what we have been doing since we were babies. From the moment that we were born, we unconsciously started a life-long process of learning.

Even though babies are blank sheets of paper waiting to be filled with information, they still offer us a lesson in the purest forms of learning. Let us take a look at what we have to learn from them:

Watch

“Every closed eye is not sleeping, and every open eye is not seeing.” – Bill Cosby

Watching is inevitable to learning. Seeing someone doing something, and then redoing it, is as old of a form of learning as the dawn itself. When you see a baby looking intensely at something it hasn’t seen before, you can see the focus and effort put in to trying to understand it and observe its behavior. With time the baby will start putting into practice what it has seen. How do you think the evil eye baby learned to give that look?

With new technology, learning by watching has been taken to new heights. Things like MIT lectures have become very popular on YouTube, as well as many computer related tutorials. It’s actually such a good way of learning that I put up an entire section on my website dedicated to math video tutorials. If nothing else, seeing is a good start, and will begin to give you an intuition of what is to ahead. If video tutorials haven’t been a part of your learning base thus far, I sincerely suggest you give it a try.

Listen

“Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens we have to keep going back and begin all over again.” – Ander Gide

Listening is the second form of learning for babies. As mentioned before, a baby is like a blank sheet of paper waiting to be filled with information. We should never stop being a blank sheet of paper, but when we grow up, we have the luxury of looking closer into some of the things we hear, and thereby decide if we erase it from our papers.

Surround yourself with positive and enthusiastic people, and you learn more than you ever thought was possible, just by listening.

Ask

“He who asks is stupid for a second he who doesn’t ask is stupid forever” – Someone

My baby cousin once asked me if there were two moons. I told him no, there is only one moon, why would you think that there are two? He said because there is one moon that is only half and one moon that is a full moon. Kids will keep asking, and so should we. Don’t let society tell you what’s ok to ask and what’s not.

Also, in order to take in information from other people, it is crucial that we keep an open mind and willingness to learn.

I once went to a seminar to see the world famous James Randi. He told a joke about how PHD graduates know everything except for saying the words “I don’t know”. The moral of the story is that in order to learn from other people, we must be at humble state of mind, not thinking that we a superior to anyone because we have a paper that says we have this or that education. We should be especially careful not to dismiss what our parents tell us.

Ask people, and learn from them.

Try new things

“Don’t fear failure so much that you refuse to try new things. The saddest summary of a life contains three descriptions: could have, might have, and should have.” – Someone

You ever wondered why babies want to put things in their mouth. It’s because they want to learn. In fact, the whole reason that babies play is because they want to learn and explore new things. I am not insisting that you start putting things in your mouth like a baby, but make sure that you don’t get scared of exploring new things in life. Don’t get stuck in your old ways, get out your comfort zone, that’s the only way we grow as people.

So let’s ease up the tension with some classic cute baby videos before we go on.

Do what you are passionate about

“Nothing great in the world has ever been accomplished without passion.”- Hebbel (German poet)

We all know that when babies play, they play what they want to play. When a baby gets tired of a toy, it simply puts it away. In the same manner, we shouldn’t force ourselves to do things in life that we are not passionate about, because that hinders our learning curves.

Hard work is the essence to all great accomplishments, and if you don’t have a spark for what you are trying to learn, then you won’t put in the hard work, and then your results are doomed to be feeble as well.

Be a baby my friend.

Today I want to speak to you about a topic that was discussed in a course I took this summer at Gothenburg University (GU). The lecturer, a professor emeritus by the name of Guy Heyden is somewhat of an embodiment of the generalist concept. He’s been active in more fields than I can pronounce, spanning everything from pathology, anthropology, histology, dentistry to sociology and oral health. Today’s article stems from the lectures that he delivered at GU a few weeks ago.

As usual, feel free to comment whether you agree or disagree your feedback is always appreciated.

Be generalists, even if you are specialists

Today we live in a global society with global issues. In such a community one can no longer cling myopically to the same approach when it comes to education. We are no longer in need of specialists but rather generalists. People familiar with several different disciplines and therefore develop a deeper and more holistic picture of the issues that arise.

What I call for is hardly a revolutionary idea, but rather a mindset that was dominant during the era of the renaissance. Rarely were the academics of that day familiar with only one topic, instead they chose to have a finger in many different areas. Sir Isaac Newton not only produced masterpieces within the fields of mathematics and physics. He was also a philosopher, astronomer and sat for a shorter period in the British Parliament. Similar generalist tendencies were to be found in almost every other scholar of that period which is illustrated by men such as Copernicus, Leibniz or Jöns Jacob Berzelius.

Another example of someone in more recent times is perhaps Sweden’s best known poet and writer, August Strindberg, who not only mastered the literary arts but was also deeply active in the natural sciences (especially chemistry), theater, art, politics and economics. A tradition that stretches far beyond the western renaissance.

In the Middle Ages we find in the Islamic world several examples of polymaths who mastered several different disciplines. Al-Khwarizmi for instance was a man who is best known for his masterpiece Al-Jabr (Algebra) where he for the first time introduced systematic solutions to linear and quadratic equations. However he did not limit himself to mathematics but was also known for his contributions in areas such as geography and astronomy.

A more prominent example of the polymaths of this era was Ibn al-Haytham (al-Hazen) who besides having been the first who defined the scientific method also was involved in optics, medicine, astronomy, physics, ophthalmology, psychology, anatomy and the engineering sciences.
Finally, we would like to say that it is time for us to stop enclosing ourselves into a particular area and hence miss the greater picture. What we should do instead is put on the generalist’s glasses and thus be able to look further than we previously imagined.

“It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma. The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense.” – Frank Herbert in Dune

As human beings we are constantly in one learning process after the other. One of the most active period of learning came during our early childhood. A child learns thousands of different concepts, impressions and words in a matter of months. To replicate that period of learning isn’t really possible. But what we can do is try to rekindle that thirst for knowledge as much as possible. If you want to learn and understand the learning process you have to be willing to buckle up and get down to business. Don’t let a single day pass you with having learnt at least one new thing of value. Learning things take time and you this is something we have to accept in order proceed.

You are different, so am I

We all learn things differently. Some people need to be more engaged when learning, others prefer theoretical work down in a basement somewhere. Keep this in mind the next time you read about the “best learning strategy”. There are numerous learning strategies and their effectiveness should be measured by taking into account more than just the method itself but also the students prepositions and the teachers way of applying that method.

Understanding how you learn

It’s not always easy to understand the best way to learn something. This is why it’s so important to try different ways and tactics. When you find the way that suits you, you can stick with it. What’s good for other people doesn’t necessarily have to be good for you.

Thus, she claimed that a student as brilliant as myself (her wording was a little different) would benefit more if I actually attended her classes (what an outrageous statement, don’t ya think?). She -much like most teachers- claimed that the best way to study is by engaging all senses into the process, the more the merrier.

Here’s where I disagree.

I prefer to view it from an engineers point of view, why differentiate and diversify when you can assimilate and optimize. If I learn more by reading lecture notes in the privacy of my home, then why on earth should I be forced to sit through long and tiresome lectures.

Here’s where the Pareto principle comes into the picture. The Pareto principle basically says that 80% of your results comes from 20% of your efforts.

So let’s say you were to try to study by using all your senses; attending lectures (hearing) and by reading (sight) and by taking notes (writing) and you were to discover that almost all of your results stem (only) from the reading that you did. If that is the case, I would recommend you optimize that outlet and allocate most of your (if not all) time pursuing that method.

It should be noted that my argument is not to say that you should leave lectures all together (some people learn best by mixing all outlets), I’m simply saying that if you notice that one method works a lot better than the rest, you should focus on that method. Always optimize, even if it means you wont diversify.

You have to quit.

The problem is, how can you decide when to quit and when to continue?

I personally believe that there’s two major reasons that makes people quit a study course: a) You lose interest in the subject. b) It becomes too difficult.

In case a there is no real controversy, if you don’t like it or if you feel it’s wrong for you; then just quit it! But what about our second scenario?

It’s here that things get a little difficult. Normally I would say that should keep on until you reach your goals, no matter how much effort it takes. Nevertheless there are some moments when you know you can’t continue, what do you do?

1. Seek Advice

Always seek advice from wise people who know about your affairs before you decide to quit a course. The person your asking must have a genuine interest in your well being, don’t ask someone who doesn’t really care what happens in your life. That’s why asking close relatives could be a real goldmine.

2. Write A Comparison
If you’ve done step 1, I would advice you to bring a white piece of paper and write down everything -both positive and negative- that could happen if you decide to quit. Write them down on two different columns and notice which one outweighs the other.

What do you say? Do you have any way of knowing if should continue or quit, please share by commenting!

¤ How To Be Focused – Be more focused on your studies.
¤ Personal Life Coaching – Can you be your own coach?
¤ Reading Comprehension – How to stay focused when reading.
¤ Elearning Course – Is it really worth it?.
¤ How To Find Inspiration – Lost your inspiration for writing? Read this!

1. Be Disciplined

“The successful student forces himself to study” a phrase I’ve used a lot in my popular college study guide (get it while it’s still cheap & hot!). There are times when you simply have to force yourself to do something, what’s gotta be done just has to be done, period.

Put up a flyer on your wall reminding you about your goals. Look at it when ever you feel some fatigue.

2. Use Sanctions

Yes, you heard me! The U.N does not carry any exclusive rights to sanctioning! What do I mean by that? Well, let us say that you want to get a paper finished within a week, what do you do?

Let us say you enjoy ice cream and you can’t “live” without it, then promise yourself (and be honest) to stop consuming any ice cream if you haven’t done your work withing the deadline. If a week has passed and your still not finished…

Good bye ice cream!

3. Reversed Sanctions

I couldn’t come up with a better name to call it. Basically, instead of punishing yourself when you haven’t done it right you punish yourself from the beginning!

Why? Just think about it, you won’t have any ice cream until you’ve finished your homework, or studied for the exam (or whatever).

This one is more effective in my view.
Do you have any ideas on how we can coach ourselves? Please share by commenting!

¤ How To Be Focused – Be more focused on your studies.
¤ Personal Goal Setting – Do you have personal goals?
¤ Famous Quote Education – Interesting quotes on education.
¤ How To Find Inspiration – How can we find inspiration?.
¤ Elearning Course – Is it really worth it?.