Brain Fitness Tip of the Week: Paying Attention to Improve Your Memory
In teaching a class on memory for people over 50, I found out a number of interesting things. One of the most important is that it confirmed something that I already knew from research studies – many apparent memory problems are actually problems with paying attention.
It looks as though your mother may have been right when she said “Pay attention!” Several studies have shown that lapses in attention may affect what you remember. As I often tell my patients, if it doesn’t get into your brain, you’re not going to be able to remember it.
As part of a brain fitness class I taught last year, we did a memory exercise drawn from a workbook about memory titled The Memory Workbook (by Douglas Mason, Michael Kohn, & Karen Clark). In the exercise, everyone looked at two cotton balls and spent a few minutes learning to appreciate their color, texture, and shape. By the end of the exercise, everyone felt that they could tell the two apart, and remember each one clearly.
What does this seemingly trivial exercise show? If you pay close attention to something you can remember it better.
What does this have to do with those troubling memory lapses? A lot. As we get older, attention doesn’t focus as automatically as it did when we were younger. We’re more easily distracted. The solution is to focus, focus, focus:
- If you’re doing something mundane such as washing the dishes, spend some time using your senses to appreciate what you’re doing. Think about the warmth of the water, the smell of the soap, and the sounds the water makes.
- If you’re taking a walk, don’t spend the whole time thinking about what you’re going to do later. Take time to attend to the wind in the trees, the colors of the leaves on the trees, and the sensation of weight in your shoes.
- When you’re driving, don’t lapse into a coma while thinking about where you’re going. Think about where you are, and check the mirrors to see who’s in back and on your sides. This has a bonus: it may make you a better driver.
- If you meet a new person and want to remember his or her name, take a few seconds to rehearse the name in your mind. Use the person’s name as soon as you can. Say “It’s nice to meet you, Bill (or Mary)” rather than just saying hello.
These are just a few examples of ways to enhance your attention during every day life. If you try, I’m sure you can find many other ways. Let me know if you find them.
You can get the The Memory Workbook at Amazon on a store link that I set up. Click here to go to the store, and browse this and other books on brain fitness.
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Mindfulness meditation as practiced over a long period by experts makes clear changes in someone’s brain function. But what about those of us who don’t have a few years to sit in a monastery in the Himalayas? A new study shows that even brief meditation practice can improve attention.
Researchers at Wake Forest University studied whether just four days of training (at just 20 minutes a day) could make a difference in participants’ mood, energy, and cognition. Undergraduate students (average age 22 years) either participated in the meditation sessions or spent a similar amount of time sitting quietly and listening to an audio book.
Participants in the meditation condition showed decreases in anxiety and improvements in several mental processing tasks compared to those in the audio book group. The meditators’ performance on one aspect of a working memory task (how many answers they got correct in a row) suggested that they may have improved their attention.
This is a small and very preliminary study that extends others’ work on meditation and the brain.It shows that even brief meditation practice can make a difference. you don’t have to be a Buddhist monk to learn to still your mind and pay better attention. Paying attention may be one of the most important things you can do to improve your brain’s functioning.
Reference:
Zeidan F et al.(in press) Mindfulness meditation improves cognition: Evidence of brief mental training. Consciousness and Cognition, doi:10.1016/j.concog.2010.03.014
I saw an interesting blog post yesterday evening on the site of the Huffington Post about the potential benefits of meditation – or at least about what one woman thinks might be the benefits. Priscilla Warner writes about the contrast between Tibetan monks’ apparent calm, evident even on brain scans, and her own anxiety disorder. Ms. Warner says that she suffers from panic disorder, a severe form of anxiety in which a person can have multiple anxiety attacks every day, even in the middle of the night. Her post is titled “I Want the Brain of a Monk” Although most people don’t suffer from anxiety this severe, many people have symptoms of anxiety. And research has consistently shown that higher levels of anxiety are related to more memory problems.
What’s the relation to brain fitness? In my brain fitness class, I often mention the usefulness of meditation in helping reduce stress and anxiety, both of which have negative effects on memory. You don’t have to go to Tibet to get the benefits of meditation. If you simply take 10 minutes several times a day to break in to the ongoing rush of getting things done, you’ve made a start. Use those 10 minutes to sit quietly, relax your muscles, and breathe deeply.
If you do that every day for two weeks, I think you’ll notice that you feel calmer and better able to focus. And if you’re better able to focus, you will be better able to pay attention and remember things.
Although many people are excited about the potential for using computers to train their brains, we shouldn’t forget that other techniques have been used to the train the brain for many centuries. I’m thinking about the large number of techniques for meditation. While free computer software still requires an investment in a computer, meditation only asks you to sit or lie quietly and focus your mind.
A recently-published study shows parts of the brain in long-term meditators are larger than the same parts of the brain in people who don’t meditate. The article by Eileen Luders and her colleagues appeared in a recent issue of the journal Neuroimage (Vol. 45, No. 3, pp. 672-678, April 15, 2009). The study showed that portions of the orbitofrontal cortex and the hippocampus were larger in persons who had been regular meditators for 5 or more years. The study is interesting because the parts of the brain that were larger are often thought to be important in helping people keep themselves emotionally balanced.
A number of strategies are likely to be helpful for meditators. There has been a great deal of interest over the last several years in mindfulness meditation. Researchers have studied how it can be used in reducing anxiety and depression. Mindfulness is based on Buddhist meditation (for a brief article, click here) but you don’t have to be a Buddhist to practice meditation. In fact, one of the most important persons who has promoted mindfulness is Jon Kabat-Zinn, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts. You can see a video presentation by him on YouTube by clicking here.
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