Most students study by rereading their notes, PowerPoints, or books. The problem is that rereading is the most ineffective way of studying there is! Why? Because reading is visually taxing and is the hardest way in which the human brain learns information. Reading is also passive. It’s kind of like learning to play basketball while watching your coach play. It won’t work. Research shows that the number one way to study is to make a practice test. Try to predict what your teacher may have on the exam. Look at your study guide, pull out old quizzes, find important parts of your notes, and ask others in your class what they think is important. Then, create a practice exam.
GREAT RESOURCE https://quizlet.com/ Other Strategies Don’t cram. Instead, spread out three hours of studying over four days, 45 minutes per night. This works for two reasons. The first is that when you review the material multiple times you gain more familiarity with it. Secondly, and most importantly, sleep on it. That’s right, sleep helps you learn. Studies show that you remember more when you take 10-15 minutes to review what you studied or learned earlier in the day just before you go to sleep. This doesn’t mean that you should do all your studying just before bedtime, but it does mean that reviewing those notes again just a few minutes before bedtime allows you to process the information as you sleep. You will remember more on test day if you reviewed it more often and have those memories stored during your sleep. Thirty minutes of cardio a day, 4-5 days a week is an optimal strategy to improve learning. Aerobic exercise can improve focus as much as a low dose of a stimulant medication to treat ADHD. If you are a student athlete, study on the bus or the car as you travel home from an event. Consider studying right after practice, too. And if you don’t play a sport, run with your dog or shoot some hoops right before you sit down to do schoolwork. Most people need to sleep 7.5-9 hours per night in order to encode memories, but teenagers typically need more, about 9.25 hours. Thirty minute afternoon naps can help, because your brain actually goes into a sort of sleep pattern in the early afternoon. Be sure these afternoon siestas aren’t too long since extended naps can interfere with sleep at night. Breaks also help. In fact, studies show that students remember more when they have breaks between study sessions that when studying straight through for an extended period of time. Having downtime allows your brain to review information even when you don’t think you’re really processing it!
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Certain Childhood Experiences Have A Lot To Do With Adult Well-being and Moral Capacities12/24/2015 Did you receive affection, play freely and feel supported in childhood? Childhood experiences like these appear to have a lot to do with well-being and moral capacities in adulthood. University of Notre Dame professor of psychology Darcia Narvaez and colleagues Lijuan Wang and Ying Cheng, associate professors of psychology, show that childhood experiences that match with evolved needs lead to better outcomes in adulthood.
According to Narvaez, one of the reasons that the well-being of children in the United States lags behind that of children in other advanced nations is because "we have forgotten that we are social mammals with specific evolved needs from birth." Narvaez emphasizes six components: Soothing, naturalistic perinatal experiences; responsiveness to a baby's needs including sensitivity to the signals of the baby before the baby cries; constant physical presence with plenty of affectionate touch; extensive breastfeeding; playful interactions with caregivers and friends; and a community of affectionate, mindful caregivers. Adults who report receiving more of such parenting practices in their childhoods display less depression and anxiety, greater ability to take the perspective of others and an orientation toward compassion. Adults who report less of these parenting practices in their childhood have poorer mental health, more distress in social situations and are less able to take another's point of view. Just one energy drink can cause potentially harmful spikes in both stress hormone levels and blood pressure in young, healthy adults, a new study shows.
After drinking a 16-ounce can of "Rockstar Punched," young adults had a 74 percent increase in blood levels of the "fight-or-flight" hormone norepinephrine, said lead researcher Dr. Anna Svatikova, a cardiologist at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. That's more than double an average 30 percent increase in norepinephrine the same participants experienced when they consumed a fake energy drink, Svatikova said. Blood pressure also spiked due to energy drinks. For example, mean blood pressure increased by 6.4 percent after energy drink consumption, compared with a 1 percent increase when the young adults downed the fake drink, the study found.The sham energy drink contained the same amount of sugar and nearly the same calories, but did not include natural stimulants found in the Rockstar drink, she said. The stimulants in the real energy drink include caffeine, taurine, guarana, ginseng and milk thistle extract. These findings were presented at the American Heart Association's annual meeting in Orlando, and the results will be published simultaneously in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Energy drinks can contain up to five times more caffeine than a typical cup of coffee, according to the U.S. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Emergency room visits involving energy drinks doubled between 2007 and 2011, rising from about 10,000 to nearly 21,000, SAMHSA said. SOURCES: Anna Svatikova, M.D., cardiologist, Mayo Clinic, Rochester, Minn.; Linda Van Horn, Ph.D., R.D., professor, preventive medicine and nutrition, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, spokeswoman, American Heart Association; Nov. 8, 2015, presentation, American Heart Association annual meeting, Orlando, Fla.; Nov. 8, 2015. Zackery doesn’t want others to end up like him. At 22, he walks with a looping gait, leaning heavily on a metal cane. He peers through thick glasses, specially designed to help his peripheral (side) vision. It takes him a moment to gather his thoughts before he speaks in a strained, thick voice. He struggles to remember his schedule day to day, and often relies on his mother to be his short-term memory schedule. Zack’s daily challenges stem from a traumatic brain injury he received while playing football when he was 13. In 2006, Zack nearly died after he got two concussions in a single football game, something called second impact syndrome. Although it’s not easy for him to get around, he’s spent the last 9 years speaking to lawmakers, coaches, athletic directors, trainers, health care workers, and parents about the dangers of concussions and what happens when they aren’t given time to heal. That’s why it was especially painful for Zack to watch the news about Kenney; the 17-year-old high school football player from Seattle who died earlier this month, 3 days after he received a head injury during a game. After his death, school officials revealed that Kenny, a wide receiver and defensive back, had suffered a concussion in September and had been cleared to play by health care professionals following the CDC’s guidelines. Had Zack sat out the rest of the game on Oct. 12, 2006, he most likely would be doing normal 22-year-old activities, like “out driving picking up chicks,” as he likes to joke. On that day, Zack suffered a concussion in the second quarter of the game when he made a tackle and hit the ground hard. He sat out for a while, but returned to the game in the second half. Zack took more hits but finished the game. As he walked off the field with his father, he collapsed and started to convulse. He was flown to Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center and came within an hour of dying from a catastrophic brain injury, says Richard G. Ellenbogen, MD, the hospital’s chief of neurological surgery.
Stress. It makes your heart pound, your breathing quicken and your forehead sweat. But while stress has been made into a public health enemy, new research suggests that stress may only be bad for you if you believe that to be the case. Psychologist Kelly McGonigal urges us to see stress as a positive, and introduces us to an unsung mechanism for stress reduction: reaching out to others.
1. You Are Creative Artists are not special, but each of us is a special kind of artist who enters the world as a creative and spontaneous thinker. While creative people believe they are creative, those who don't hold that belief are not. After acquiring beliefs about their identity, creative people become interested in expressing themselves, so they learn thinking habits and techniques that creative geniuses have used throughout history. 2. Creative Thinking Is Work You must show passion and the determination to immerse yourself in the process of developing new and different ideas. The next step is patience and perseverance. All creative geniuses work with intensity and produce an incredible number of ideas -- most of which are bad. In fact, more bad poems were written by major poets than by minor poets. Thomas Edison generated 3,000 different lighting system ideas before he evaluated them for practicality and profitability. 3. You Must Go Through the Motions When producing ideas, you replenish neurotransmitters linked to genes that are being turned on and off in response to challenges. Going through the motions of generating new ideas increases the number of contacts between neurons, and thereby energizes the brain. Every hour spent activating your mind by generating ideas increases creativity. By painting a picture every day, you would become an artist -- perhaps not Van Gogh, but more of an artist than someone who has never tried. Traumatic brain injuries have ended countless careers in professional athletics before they began, but few of these injured athletes were forced to make the decision right as their dreams were coming true.
Adrian Coxson was an undrafted free agent rookie from Stony Brook signed with the Green Bay Packers in May and was preparing for his shot at the big time, but instead he found himself being carted off the Packers’ practice field in early August with a brain injury that would put an end to all of his plans. It was only the third day of training camp in his rookie season when Coxson suffered a Grade 3 concussion that would make him decide to retire before more severe damage was done. “I’m retiring because I’m still having symptoms and my health is more important to me than the game of football,” Coxson said in a telephone interview with the National Football Post. “It’s been recommended to me by two neurologists and two doctors to retire from football. The next hit to my head could possibly kill me or be life damaging. This last one could be life damaging. It has taken a great toll on me. This concussion was a bad one. A Grade 3 concussion is real serious.” Coxson told the National Football Post that he has no regrets. “I take pride in that, I take pride in being able to function right now from this injury,” he said. “I’m concerned about my health and I’m concerned about how healthy I am and I want to get to as close to 100 percent as I can get. I’m concerned about the outcome of this whole injury. It was a bad one.” It’s always up to the athlete to decide whether the reward is worth the risk from brain injuries, but incidents like Coxson’s are not uncommon and it is important to know when the risk becomes too great. Traumatic brain injury is the skeleton that the NFL has tried to keep in its closet for far too long. Now that's coming to light on the brightest stage possible. Will Smith's new movie Concussion will expose people who don't care about football to the plights of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE. Dr. Bennet Omalu, the former NFL and NCAA doctor who first identified chronic brain injury common factor in the deaths of several former NFL players, including Junior Seau following his death in 2012. The trailer presents the NFL as a dangerous syndicate working to discredit, disavow and coerce a doctor into hiding his research, while Omalu strives to present the truth.
Students heading back to school can always count on one thing: Technology will be a little bit more advanced than it was last year. After all, 21st century learning experiences are increasingly enhanced by gadgets and software, and the ability to plug into worlds beyond the classroom. Even so, technology is no substitute for everyday student engagement and collaboration among students, researchers find.
The study, published in Computers & Education, was the culmination of 20 years of analysis of 1,105 courses dating back to 1990, the year that spawned the World Wide Web. Only 10 percent of concussions involve a loss of consciousness, but the other 90 percent can still produce symptoms! Children who exhibit the following warning signs should be stopped, evaluated, and followed by a physician until symptoms resolve.
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