What are the best ways to learn ?

I am sure many of us now are realising that the days and months are going quicker and quicker, and before long the exam season will be here upon us. Even though it is a task many of us loathe to do, revision is an important task needed to be done. Therefore, we decided to investigate what are the most successful ways to study and revise, which may hopefully help all of us !

A new study says taking practice tests and engaging in distributed practice -- which means sticking to a schedule of spreading out your studying over time -- work the best. Surprisingly, the methods that were least effective when it came to getting a good grade on the big test were: summarization, highlighting, keyword mnemonics, creating imagery for text and re-reading. Therefore I am afraid just highlighting your notes, does not mean you have revised, sorry!

"I was shocked that some strategies that students use a lot -- such as re-reading and highlighting -- seem to provide minimal benefits to their learning and performance," study author Dr. John Dunlosky, professor of psychology and director of experimental training at Kent State University, said in a written statement. "By just replacing re-reading with delayed retrieval practice, students would benefit."

Ten different learning techniques were reviewed Dunlosky and his team and their review was published in the January 2013 issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest.

The widely-used learning methods examined were:

• Elaborative interrogation: Generating an explanation for why an explicitly stated fact or concept is true
• Self-explanation: Explaining how new information is related to known information, or explaining steps taken during problem solving
• Summarization: Writing summaries (of various lengths) of to-be-learned texts
• Highlighting/underlining: Marking potentially important portions of to-be-learned materials while reading
• Keyword mnemonic: Using keywords and mental imagery to associate verbal materials
• Imagery for text: Attempting to form mental images of text materials while reading or listening
• Re-reading: Re-studying text material again after an initial reading
• Practice testing: Self-testing with flash cards or taking practice tests over to-be-learned material
• Distributed practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that spreads out study activities over time
• Interleaved practice: Implementing a schedule of practice that mixes different kinds of problems, or a schedule of study that mixes different kinds of material, within a single study session
But as mentioned previously, the two best were taking practice tests and engaging in distributed practice.

So now you know have to revise, it is now just a matter of when !

Victoria Kersey - Donovan and Lisa Murphy

Do smartphones make us lazy?

Every day we get everything from our phone we rely on them all day every day. Want to know who wrote that song? Google it. What train to get. Look on your app. We wonder how people managed to cope without them, but to be fair how hard could it actually be? Instead of actually thinking about things or memorising numbers we rely on our smartphones for everything. New study from the University of Waterloo in Canada says that there is connection between reliance on smartphones and not thinking deeply about how to solve problems.

Other studies have found that people who have strong cognitive skills spend less time on their devices than those with less brain power and those who think analytically also use their phone less frequently because they remember things or are able to work problems out for themselves.

So get off your phones and maybe you’ll discover your true potential!

Love Ella and Neamh

Why People with Asperger’s Syndrome Lack Empathy

Aspies have a huge disconnect between thinking and feeling, or cognitive empathy (CE) and emotional empathy (EE). But what is the cause of this disconnect?

True empathy is the ability to be aware of one’s own feelings and thoughts at the same time you are aware of another person’s feelings and thoughts (or several other persons’). It means having the ability to speak about this awareness and creating mutual understanding and a sense of caring for one another.

According to the latest neuroscience research discussed in Simon Baron-Cohen’s book, The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil, the cause is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.

Each brain part in the empathy circuit is not so functional by itself but needs the other circuits to carry out the complex empathy task of really stepping into the shoes of another person.

• The medial prefrontal cortex compares your perspective to another person’s perspective.
• The dorsal medial prefrontal cortex helps you understand your own thoughts and feelings.
• The ventral medial prefrontal cortex stores information about how strongly you feel about a course of action.
• The inferior frontal gyrus helps with emotion recognition.
• The caudal anterior cingulate cortex is activated with pain, both when you feel yours and observe it in others.
• The anterior insula is involved in bodily self-awareness, something that is tied to empathy.
• The right temporoparietal junction helps you judge another person’s intentions and beliefs.
• The amygdala plays a central role in empathy because of its connection to fear, thereby cueing you to look at someone’s eyes to help you gather information about that person’s emotions and intentions. People with Asperger’s Syndrome avoid eye contact unless they are specifically instructed to look someone in the eye so a lot of information is lost.
• The mirror neuron system connects several parts of the brain. It responds when you engage in an action and when you observe others engage in an action. For example, these neurons fire when you gaze in a certain direction or observe another person gazing in the same direction (hence, “mirroring”). Your mirror neurons make you look in the same direction as the speaker, but you also need other empathy circuits to make meaning of why you are looking.

These are just a few regions of the brain’s empathy circuits. You can see that it’s a very complex system. If a single one of them doesn’t work, the whole network suffers, and so do our relationships.

“Will Aspies always be like this?” Researchers and clinicians aren’t sure. There are some promising therapies. So far we really have as little information on successful clinical interventions as we do on the genetic and neurological structure of the brain. The Aspie needs to recognize that he or she does indeed have zero degrees of empathy. And, the Aspie needs to stop expecting that his or her grasp of the facts should rule.

Reference

Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2011). The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Evil. New York: Basic Books, Inc.

Baron-Cohen suggests the cause of an Asperger’s sufferer’s lack of good social skills is poorly working empathy circuits in the brain.