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You can improve your memory by learning memory techniques that are thousands of years old. That's what Nelson Dellis did to train for the USA Memory Championship, and you might know that Nelson has won the top prize for two years running. We have teamed up with Nelson to create this "Upgrade Your Memory" video that teaches memorization techniques that can enhance your business and personal life. Since we all have the same "hardware," it's really an upgrade of our "software," or brain, that makes all the difference.

years running. We have teamed up with Nelson to create this "Upgrade Your Memory" video that teaches memorization techniques that can enhance your business and personal life. Since we all have the same "hardware," it's really an upgrade of our "software," or brain, that makes all the difference. Fusion-io talked to Nelson to discuss the value of memory in our lives. Check out our interview with Nelson on the Fusion Blog: www.fusionio.com/blog/Follow us on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/fusionioOr Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/#!/fusionio Category: Science & Technology Tags: Nelson Dellis upgrade your memory mental athlete USA Memory Competition USA Memory Championship USA Memory champion list memorization memorizing lists memory techniques Alzheimer's Climb for Memory Fusion-io fusionio fusion i/o Fusion IO @fusionio Licence: Standard YouTube Licence 261 likes, 3 dislikes Show more Show fewer Link to this comment: Share to:

Boost Your Creativity by Improving Your Working Memory

In one study, the researchers actually explored the creativity of improvisations played by cellists with no formal training in improvisation. At the start of the study, they measured everyone's working memory capacity. Then, participants were given the chance to perform three 3-minute improvisations based on a theme (such as Winter or Spring). Each improvisation had a different theme. The improvisations were recorded in a studio, and then professional musicians rated them for their originality and creativity. The creativity of the first improvisations people performed was about the same regardless of their working memory capacity. However, the people with high working memory capacity played better improvisations as they progressed through the study, while those with low working memory capacity played worse improvisations. So, by the end of the study, the people with higher working memory capacity were playing significantly more creative improvisations than those with low working memory capacity.

Meditation Can Improve Your Memory, Focus, and Productivity at Work

If you haven't given meditation a try yet, despite the many advantages we've already seen (including chronic pain and stress relief, reducing information overload, and building a better brain), here's one more argument for trying the practice: meditation may help you get more done at work.

A recent study by University of Washington researchers (PDF) found that meditation training helped workers concentrate better, remember more of their work details, and stay energized and experience less negative moods.

Remember More Without Trying Too Hard

Memory is a tricky beast. You might sit and study for hours on end, but for some reason it never seems to stick with you. However, as Time points out, implicit learning relies on three factors that are easy to control.

You'll need to do three things when studying or learning a new skill: Give your mind a ton of material: This might seem obvious, but immersing yourself completely in what you're trying to learn is the first step to actually learning it. You don't have to actively try to memorize things, just expose yourself to the skill or material as much as possible. Practice: We tend to stop practicing a skill or stop studying when we think "we've got it." However, well after we learn something we still continue to refine that skill. Sleep: It's thought that sleep is essential to learning and remembering. Some studies have suggested that the brain identifies patterns in our memories and consolidates them to make them permanent when we're sleeping. In essence, a good night of rest might be better than an all-night study-fest.

Food For Thought: What to Eat to Boost Your Memory

Caffeine: A User’s Guide to Getting Optimally Wired

Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world, but few use it to maximal advantage. Get optimally wired with these tips.

1) Consume in small, frequent amounts. Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function. Caffeine crosses the blood-brain barrier quickly (owing to its lipid solubility) although it can take up to 45 minutes for full ingestion through the gastro-intestinal tract. Under normal conditions, this remains stable for around 1 hour before gradually clearing in the following 3-4 hours (depending on a variety of factors). A landmark 2004 study showed that small hourly doses of caffeine (.3mg per kg of body weight [approx 20 mg per hour; thanks digg!]) can support extended wakefulness, potentially by counteracting the homeostatic sleep pressure, which builds slowly across the day and acts preferentially on the prefrontal cortex (an area of the brain thought responsible for executive and “higher” cognitive functions).

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a novel by George Orwell published in 1949. It is a dystopian and satirical novel set in Oceania, where society is tyrannized by The Party and its totalitarian ideology.[1] The Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, and public mind control, dictated by a political system euphemistically named English Socialism (Ingsoc) under the control of a privileged Inner Party elite that persecutes all individualism and independent thinking as thoughtcrimes.[2] Their tyranny is headed by Big Brother, the quasi-divine Party leader who enjoys an intense cult of personality, but who may not even exist. Big Brother and the Party justify their rule in the name of a supposed greater good.[1]

George Orwell "encapsulate[d] the thesis at the heart of his unforgiving novel" in 1944, and three years later wrote most of it on the Scottish island of Jura, from 1947 to 1948, despite being seriously ill with tuberculosis.[4] On 4 December 1948, he sent the final manuscript to the publisher Secker and Warburg and Nineteen Eighty-Four was published on 8 June 1949.[5][6] By 1989, it had been translated into sixty-five languages, more than any other novel in English at the time.[7

Nineteen Eighty-Four is on Spacious Planet's list of "21 most surprising banned books" for having being banned in Russia and very nearly banned in the UK and the US.[29]

The Science Behind Why Power Naps Help You Stay Productive and Creative

Even if you don't work in a job where napping is acceptable, there's a very clear reason why the best naps are the ones that are usually around the half-hour mark.

The video above, from ASAP Science (worth subscribing to on YouTube if you dig videos like this) explains how sleep cycles work, and how power naps—or those naps that do the most to boost cognitive function during the day—take advantage of the first two phases of your sleep cycle: stage one, where you're probably "dozing," or feel relaxed but if someone woke you you probably wouldn't even notice you'd been asleep, and stage two, where your brain starts to consolidate memories, organize its biological bookshelves, and shuts the brain off from external, non-dangerous stimuli. If you're the type who says "It takes me 10 minutes just to fall asleep," that 10 minutes is probably leading you into stage one—after that, you're in stage two. The trouble comes in stage three, or the part where we're sleeping deeply, and waking is difficult. That's when you start to feel groggy, and hate the idea of getting up. If you hate mornings, you're probably waking up during this phase. So the key to getting all of the benefits of naps without the drawbacks is to sleep only for about a half-hour, or the time it takes your brain to go through the first two stages, but not enter the third.

affeine is one seriously misunderstood substance. It's not a simple upper, and it works differently on different people with different tolerances—even in different menstrual cycles. But you can make it work better for you.

Luckily, one intrepid reader and writer has actually done that reading, and weighed that evidence, and put together a highly readable treatise on the subject. Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine, by Stephen R. Braun, is well worth the short 224-page read. It was released in 1997, but remains the most accessible treatise on what is and isn't understood about what caffeine and alcohol do to the brain.

Caffeine Doesn't Actually Get You Wired Right off the bat, it's worth stating again: the human brain, and caffeine, are nowhere near totally understood and easily explained by modern science. That said, there is a consensus on how a compound found all over nature, caffeine, affects the mind.

You Could Be Better at Remembering Names, If Only You Gave a Shit

ome people are more tuned in to personal relationships—like politicians or teachers—and they're more apt to be good at remembering people's names because they're have an interest in remembering them. But for the rest of us, we may just simply not be that engaged when we meet someone.

In economics and contract theory, information asymmetry deals with the study of decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry, a kind of market failure in the worst case. Examples of this problem are adverse selection,[1] moral hazard, and information monopoly.[2] Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principal–agent problems. In 2001, the Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph E. Stiglitz "for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information."[3]

Information asymmetry models assume that at least one party to a transaction has relevant information whereas the other(s) do not. Some asymmetric information models can also be used in situations where at least one party can enforce, or effectively retaliate for breaches of, certain parts of an agreement whereas the other(s) cannot.

In adverse selection models, the ignorant party lacks information while negotiating an agreed understanding of or contract to the transaction, whereas in moral hazard the ignorant party lacks information about performance of the agreed-upon transaction or lacks the ability to retaliate for a breach of the agreement. An example of adverse selection is when people who are high risk are more likely to buy insurance, because the insurance company cannot effectively discriminate against them, usually due to lack of information about the particular individual's risk but also sometimes by force of law or other constraints. An example of moral hazard is when people are more likely to behave recklessly after becoming insured, either because the insurer cannot observe this behavior or cannot effectively retaliate against it, for example by failing to renew the insurance.

Even the Buddhist ideal of having no desires, and hence no unsatisfied desires, is extremely difficult to achieve and maintain for a whole society – not least of all for younger people (who, Daleiden says, have less self control). Science of morality could never yield a utopia. Nevertheless, science of morality could greatly increase well-being for very many people.[54]

Daleiden's last factor in prosocial training, mental associations, is quite familiar: he says it has been traditionally understood as the conscience – where the student learns to feel empathy, and to feel regret for harming others. Unless an individual can, and begins to feel empathy, it may be unlikely that any amount of reasoning, or any coherent moral system will motivate them to behave very altruistically.

it should be the intention of adults to shape children, or presumably "indoctrinate" them, to think critically. He adds that the focus is on especially socially relevant values (e.g. kindness, sharing, reasoning) and not the more personal

Advocates of 'cliodynamics' say that they can use scientific methods to illuminate the past. But historians are not so sure.

Turchin has been taking the mathematical techniques that once allowed him to track predator–prey cycles in forest ecosystems, and applying them to human history. He has analysed historical records on economic activity, demographic trends and outbursts of violence in the United States, and has come to the conclusion that a new wave of internal strife is already on its way1. The peak should occur in about 2020, he says, and will probably be at least as high as the one in around 1970. “I hope it won't be as bad as 1870,” he adds.

Cliodynamics is viewed with deep scepticism by most academic historians, who tend to see history as a complex stew of chance, individual foibles and one-of-a-kind situations that no broad-brush 'science of history' will ever capture.