Enhance Your Ability to Remember

Certain mental techniques can enhance your ability to remember. Have a go at experimenting with some of the below to see what works best for you.
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Acronyms
Create a phrase using the first letter of a series of items you’d like to remember.
For example, to remember to pick up milk, eggs, bread, cereal, Nutella, and avocados, one might create the phrase:
My Entire Book Collection Needs Attention (M.E.B.C.N.A); bizarreness can add to memorability.

Chunking
Breaking down a long series of units into easy-to-remember groupings can make things more manageable and help improve recall. This is the reason why phone numbers are typically grouped into three and four digit units. We suggest this technique for Lumosity’s Monster Garden, Memory Matrix, and Moneycomb exercises; think of clusters of stimuli in terms of what recognizable shapes they make, e.g. “L” or “T” shaped is easier to remember than “three long by two wide”.

Caffeine
In moderation, caffeine can temporarily boost your memory and shorten reaction times. A couple of cups of coffee or a few cups of tea also provide antioxidants for bodily health.

Visualizing
Creating detailed imagery and associations can help with solidifying memories over the long term. The more creative you can get with your imagination, the better: if you meet someone named Nick, perhaps envision him with a white beard and think of him as St. Nick.

Napping
Taking power naps, from 10-20 minutes, can help consolidate memories and learning. Sleeping longer, however, can end up making you groggy.

Memory Jogs
Writing down reminders and strategically placing them in your home, car, and workplace is a good way to jog your memory about important tasks or events.

Brain Training
By strategically exercising your brain it is possible to improve working memory along with other cognitive abilities. Supercharge Your Brain, Reverse Memory Loss, and Remember What Matters Most, read the Memory Rescue kindle book
Enrich Your Environment
Enriching your environment through engaging people, media, and new experiences can improve learning, cognitive reserve and even reinvigorate faded memories. Go on a day trip or work in a volunteer setting!

Catching ZZZZs
Getting enough sleep at night helps consolidate learning and the formation of new memories from the day’s experiences. People typically do best with 7-9 hours a night.

Breathing
Deep, slow breathing can de-activate the “flight or fight” side of your nervous system, protecting the brain from the damaging memory effects of excessive stress.

Hydration
Proper hydration boosts the speed of neuronal firing. Unfortunately, most people are chronically dehydrated, due in large part to the prevalence of alcohol, caffeine, sugar and high protein foods. Eight glasses of water per day is ideal.

Sugar
Consumption of concentrated sugars can spike insulin levels, resulting in fatigue and compromising cognitive functioning. Keeping to complex, instead of simple, carbohydrates helps slow and balance sugar absorption, resulting in more stable energy levels. Complex carbohydrates generally include those in wholegrain form.

Breaking a Sweat
Periodic cardiovascular exercise has been shown to reduce the toxic effects of prolonged stress and stimulate the production of new hippocampal neurons (important for learning and the formation of new memories).

Green Leafies
Vegetables such as kale, collards, chard and spinach have high levels of anti-oxidants which help protect your brain from daily wear and tear.

Dark Chocolate
Eating dark chocolate, the darker the better, also helps protect the brain. This is because chocolate has one of the highest anti-oxidant contents of any food. Keeping it dark minimizes the negative impact of excessive fat and sugar.

Being Social
Engaging people exercises diverse areas of the brain, keeping your cognitive processes active and fit.

Dancing
Dancing is not only a great way to reap the benefits of being social, but it also involves balancing and coordinating movement, all of which are good for your head.

New Languages
Learning a new language pushes the limits of your knowledge and contributes to cognitive reserve. This helps to prevent and slow the effects of mental decline.

Rhyming
Incorporating what you’d like to remember into a rhyme can help with later recall. A common example of this used for plumbing is “righty tighty, lefty loosey”.

Associations
Associating what you’d like to remember with an environment, feeling, or person will help recall on demand. Association is generally used to describe any learning process aside from simple habituation.



Relaxing
Excessive stress can cause brain damage. Your hippocampus (responsible for consolidating new memories) is especially sensitive.

Game Playing
Playing games, whether online or otherwise, can stretch the mind and help build adaptive neural networks.

Rehearsing
Rehearsing new information to yourself, or aloud to others, helps reinforce associated neural networks and learning.

Meditation
Periodically calming and focusing the mind has been shown to help with attention, processing speed, and response times, in addition to relieving stress.

Paying attention
Good attention is the foundation of good memory. Pay special attention next time someone introduces himself, or when you need to remember something else specific, and notice how this affects your later recall.

Supercharge Your Brain, Reverse Memory Loss, and Remember What Matters Most, read the Memory Rescue kindle book

How To Show Love To an Autistic Child

One of the most pervasive myths that surround Autism is that a child who has it will never show affection and can’t accept getting affection from anyone. There have been literally piles of stories of parents taking their child to a psychologist and the doctor telling the parents that your child can’t possibly be autistic because he gives you a hug now and then. While this opinion is just flat wrong, studies have shown that autistic children do process sensory touch differently than a non-autistic child and that this is where the myth that autistic children don’t like to be touched comes from.

Autism and the way it affects kids really runs the gamut from light to severe. An excellent point to remember when dealing with an autistic child is that every single autistic child is different and will react to almost everything differently. Here are some tips for showing your autistic child affection, and remember, your experience may vary.

• Trial and error. For some kids with more severe autism, a simple, random hug can be sensory overload. They can become agitated, upset and even violent if they are touched without prior warning. You will probably need to have a trial and error approach when it comes to hugging and touching your autistic child. Some methods may be responded to in a positive way, other ways won’t be. You just have to try and see.

• Let the child come to you. If you think your autistic child needs a hug, instead of rushing into his personal space and just taking one, speak to the child, bend down to his/her level and open your arms. Smile and let the child know that they are loved and see what the response is. If they don’t come running in for a hug, don’t be offended, it may just not have been the right time for the child.

• Try hand signals. If your child is too sensitive to hugs or touches to show affection, you can try positive reinforcement in addition to hand singles. Things like a simple thumbs up accompanied by a smile and some positive comments can let the child know they are loved and what they did was good. You can also offer the child a chance to hug during these situations and they might just take you up on it.

• Make sure everyone is on the same page. If you, the parents, are starting to make progress on getting your autistic child to be more affectionate, you don’t need a sibling, teacher or grandparent who doesn’t know or understand your child’s boundaries messing up all of your hard work. If you’ve begun to implement an affection program with your autistic child, make sure everyone who would possibly try to hug or touch him/her knows the rules. Consistency and repetition are crucial to autistic kids, and this applies to a situation like this, as well.


Trying to figure out a puzzling condition like autism can be a lifelong challenge. For many parents, the affection issue may be the biggest. But with patience and learning to go by the child’s cues and not your own, you will be able to connect with your child in a deep and meaningful way.

You Can find more resources and information about the diagnoses, control and treatment of Autism in, The Essential Guide To Autism

Reclaim Your Brain

It has long been thought that our mental abilities were fixed at a young age, with no possibility of improvement .
In recent years more evidence raised that our mental abilities, such as memory, attention, creativity, and problem solving,
can be improved at any age with the right kind of brain exercise.
A number of scientific studies have shown that properly constructed exercises can lead to improvements that go beyond
the task subjects used for training. Last year, a University of Michigan lab demonstrated that working memory training
can lead to an improvement in fluid intelligence.
Another set of studies by researchers at the University of Alabama linked visual attention training to safer driving.
Research in the field of cognitive science is currently at an explosive stage where it will likely remain until the brain
and all of its intricate workings are mapped and understood.
Users of brain exercises are experiencing positive, often profound, results including :improved reasoning, speed, and accuracy
clearer thinking , improvemnet of short-term working memory , enhanced problem solving abilities and creative thinking.
Try the scientific brain training program by Lumosity. It’s fun and it improves memory and attention. Get started for free.