Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon by Rahul Jandial

So the next time you need to remember items on your grocery list, try to think of everything in a given category, such as fruit or dairy products, before moving onto the next area of the store. When researchers provided lists of categories to all participants in the group, both intelligent and less-intelligent people performed equally well. A 2013 study published in the journal Memory and Cognition found that when asked to list all of the animals they could think of, the intelligent participants of a tested group were capable of listing more animals than the less-intelligent participants only because they could think of more categories of animal. It involves thinking of every item in a given category before moving onto another one.

You can also improve your memory with something called area-restricted searching. For example, do you remember how much the Federal Trade Commission sued Lumosity for? If not, go back over the information in this blink and then try testing yourself again. Testing yourself when learning tends to result in better memory recall than simply reading information. The program requires players to focus on a central target while identifying icons that pop up in the periphery of the screen.Īnother way to improve memory is by self-testing.

But not all brain training is a sham! Brain HQ, a program designed to boost your cognitive speed, has been proven to improve long-term memory and reasoning skills and even drastically reduce the risk of developing dementia. Now, it’s true that in 2016, Lumosity, a popular online brain game service, faced a $2 million Federal Trade Commission lawsuit in the US for making unsubstantiated claims – so the reputation of brain-training services has been tarnished recently. It means you can boost your natural memory abilities, for instance by using brain training.

The fact that cognitive ability is not simply determined by our genes is great news. Today, most scientists agree that the “Flynn effect,” as it has become known, suggests that the widespread adoption of new technologies, like radio and television and, later, the internet and smartphones, over the last century has made us evolve cognitively. Flynn argued that his discovery proved that humans have adapted to an increasingly cognitively challenging world. Flynn discovered that, from the beginning of the twentieth century, overall IQ scores had been rising by three points per decade. A great leap forward on this front was made in 1984 when the New Zealand academic James R. Scientists have long attempted to discover ways of improving cognitive functions like memory.

Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon by Rahul Jandial