Strategies

A small Swedish brain imaging study adds to the evidence for the cognitive benefits of learning a new language by investigating the brain changes in students undergoing a highly intensive language course.

Back in 2010, I briefly reported on a study suggesting that a few minutes of ‘quiet time’ could help you consolidate new information. A new study provides more support for this idea.

Here’s an exciting little study, implying as it does that one particular aspect of information processing underlies much of the cognitive decline in older adults, and that this can be improved through training. No, it’s not our usual suspect, working memory, it’s something far less obvious: temporal processing.

Spatial abilities have been shown to be important for achievement in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering, math), but many people have felt that spatial skills are something you’re either born with or not.

I’ve reported, often, on the evidence that multitasking is a problem, something we’re not really designed to do well (with the exception of a few fortunate individuals), and that the problem is rooted in our extremely limited working memory capacity. I’ve also talked about how ‘working memory’ is a bit of a misnomer, given that we probably have several ‘working memories’, for different modalities.

My recent reports on brain training for older adults (see, e.g., Review of working memory training programs finds no broader benefit; Cognitive training shown to help healthy older adults; Video game training benefits cognition in some older adults) converge on the idea that cognitive training can indeed be beneficial for older adults’

Adding to the growing evidence for the long-term cognitive benefits of childhood music training, a new study has found that even a few years of music training in childhood has long-lasting benefits for auditory discrimination.

The study involved 45 adults (aged 18-31), of whom 15 had no music training, 15 had one to five years of training, and 15 had six to eleven years. Participants were presented with different complex sounds ranging in pitch while brainstem activity was monitored.

I’ve reported before on how London taxi drivers increase the size of their posterior hippocampus by acquiring and practicing ‘the Knowledge’ (but perhaps at the expense of other functions). A new study in similar vein has looked at the effects of piano tuning expertise on the brain.

Meditation may improve multitasking

I recently reported that developing skill at video action games doesn’t seem to improve general multitasking ability, but perhaps another approach might be more successful. Meditation has, of course, been garnering growing evidence that it can help improve attentional control. A new study extends that research to multitasking in a realistic work setting.

The research is pretty clear by this point: humans are not (with a few rare exceptions) designed to multitask. However, it has been suggested that the modern generation, with all the multitasking they do, may have been ‘re-wired’ to be more capable of this. A new study throws cold water on this idea.