Simple Tricks to Sharpen Thinking and Memory Skills

                  

                       Simple Tricks to Sharpen Thinking and Memory Skills

Using these memory-enhancing techniques can help improve your ability to learn new information and retain it over time.

1. Repeat

One of the golden rules of learning and memory is repeat, repeat, repeat. The brain also responds to novelty so repeating something in a different way or at a different time will make the most of the novelty effect and allow you to build stronger memories. Examples of using repletion include:

• Taking notes.
• Repeating a name after you hear it for the first time.
• Repeating or paraphrasing what someone says to you.

2. Organize

A day planner or smart phone calendar can help you keep track of appointments and activities and can also serve as a journal in which you write anything that you would like to remember. Writing down and organizing information reinforces learning.

• Try jotting down conversations, thoughts, experiences.
• Review current and previous day’s entries at breakfast and dinner.
• If you use a planner and not a smart phone, keep it in the same spot at home and take it with you whenever you leave.

3. Visualize

Learning faces and names is a particularly hard task for most people. In addition to repeating a person’s name, you can also associate the name with an image. Visualization strengthens the association you are making between the face and the name. For example:

• Link the name Sandy with the image of a beach, and imagine Sandy on the beach.

4. Cue

When you are having difficulty recalling a particular word or fact, you can cue yourself by giving related details or “talking around” the word, name, or fact. Other practical ways to cue include:

• Using alarms or a kitchen timer to remind you of tasks or appointments.
• Placing an object associated with the task you must do in a prominent place at home. For example, if you want to order tickets to a play, leave a newspaper ad for the play near your telephone or computer.

5. Group

When you’re trying to remember a long list of items, it can help to group the items in sets of three to five, just as you would to remember a phone number. This strategy capitalizes on organization and building associations, and helps to extend the capacity of our short-term memory by chunking information together instead of trying to remember each piece of information independently. For example:

• If you have a list of 15 things on your grocery list, you can group the items by category, such as dairy, produce, canned goods, and frozen foods.

SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS :- DYSLEXIA

SIGNS AND SYMPTOMS :- DYSLEXIA

Learning to read - the child, despite having normal intelligence and receiving proper teaching and parental support, has difficulty learning to read.

Milestones reached later - the child learns to crawl, walk, talk, throw or catch things, ride a bicycle later than the majority of other kids.

Speech - apart from being slow to learn to speak, the child commonly mispronounces words, finds rhyming extremely challenging, and does not appear to distinguish between different word sounds.

Slow at learning sets of data - at school the child takes much longer than the other children to learn the letters of the alphabet and how they are pronounced. There may also be problems 

remembering the days of the week, months of the year, colors, and some arithmetic tables.

Coordination - the child may seem clumsier than his or her peers. Catching a ball may be difficult.

Left and right - the child commonly gets "left" and "right" mixed up.

Reversal - numbers and letters may be reversed without realizing.

Spelling - may not follow a pattern of progression seen in other children. The child may learn how to spell a word today, and completely forget the next day. One word may be spelt in a variety of ways on the same page.

Phonology problems - phonology refers to the speech sounds in a language. If a word has more than two syllables, phonology processing becomes much more difficult. For example, with the word "unfortunately" a person with dyslexia may be able to process the sounds "un" and "ly", but not the ones in between.

Concentration span - children with dyslexia commonly find it hard to concentrate for long, compared to other children. Many adults with dyslexia say this is because after a few minutes of non-stop struggling, the child is mentally exhausted. A higher number of children with dyslexia also have ADHD (attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder), compared to the rest of the population.

Sequencing ideas - when a person with dyslexia expresses a sequence of ideas, they may seem illogical for people without the condition.

Autoimmune conditions - people with dyslexia are more likely to develop immunological problems, such as hay fever, asthma, eczema,and other allergies.