IMPROVING MEMORY!

Improving your memory...

It is inevitable as we grow older that our memories fail to function as well as they did when we were young. Older people especially need ways of remembering information it is all too frustrating to find myself walking from Gwyer to main school to find I’ve forgotten why I was going there. A ‘mnemonic’ is another word for a memory tool. Mnemonics are techniques for remembering information that is otherwise quite difficult to recall: A very simple example is the ‘30 days hath September’ rhyme for remembering the number of days in each calendar month. Rhymes and music are excellent ways of training our memory as in simple tunes for learning the alphabet.
The idea behind using mnemonics is to encode difficult-to-remember information in a way that is much easier to remember.
Our brains evolved to code and interpret complex stimuli such as images, colours, structures, sounds, smells, tastes, touch, positions, emotions and language. We use these to make models of the world we live in and to navigate our way around it. Our memories store all of these very effectively. Unfortunately, a lot of the information we have to remember in our daily life is presented differently – as words printed on a page. While writing is a rich way for conveying complex arguments, our brains do not easily encode written information, making it difficult to remember.
Using Your Whole Mind to Remember
The key idea is that by coding information using vivid mental images, you can reliably code both information and the structure of information. And because the images are vivid, they are easy to recall when you need them. The techniques explained here show you how to code information vividly, using stories, strong mental images, familiar journeys, and so on.
You can do the following things to make your mnemonics more memorable:
• Use positive, pleasant images. Your brain often blocks out unpleasant ones.
• Use vivid, colourful, sense-laden images – these are easier to remember than drab ones.
• Use all your senses to code information or dress up an image. Remember that your mnemonic can contain sounds, smells, tastes, touch, movements and feelings as well as pictures.
• Give your image three dimensions, movement and space to make it more vivid. You can use movement either to maintain the flow of association, or to help you to remember actions.
• Exaggerate the size of important parts of the image.
• Use humour! Funny or peculiar things are easier to remember than normal ones.
• Similarly, rude rhymes are very difficult to forget but not too rude...
• Symbols (red traffic lights, pointing fingers, road signs, etc.) can code complex messages quickly and effectively.
Designing Mnemonics: Imagination, Association and Location
The three fundamental principles underlying the use of mnemonics are imagination, association and location. Working together, you can use these principles to generate powerful mnemonic systems.
Imagination: is what you use to create and strengthen the associations needed to create effective mnemonics. Your imagination is what you use to create mnemonics that are potent for you. The more strongly you imagine and visualise a situation, the more effectively it will stick in your mind for later recall. The imagery you use in your mnemonics can be as violent and vivid as you like, as long as it helps you to remember.
Association: this is the method by which you link a thing to be remembered to a way of remembering it. You can create associations by:
• Placing things on top of each other.
• Crashing things together.
• Merging images together.
• Wrapping them around each other.
• Rotating them around each other or having them dancing together.
• Linking them using the same colour, smell, shape, or feeling.
As an example, you might link the number 1 with a goldfish by visualizing a 1-shaped spear being used to spear it.
Location: gives you two things: a coherent context into which you can place information so that it hangs together, and a way of separating one mnemonic from another. By setting one mnemonic in a particular town, I can separate it from a similar mnemonic set in a city. For example, by setting one in Wimbledon and another similar mnemonic with images of Manchester, we can separate them with no danger of confusion. You can build the images and atmosphere of these places into your mnemonics to strengthen the feeling of location.

Noureen on Hope...

Another thoughtful and inspiring blog from Noureen on hope...

Dear Dr Brown,


Below is my opinion on this week's blog on 'Hope':


I believe 'Hope' is something society is very fond of, since we like to be hopeful every time we face a challenge or hurdle in our lives. As you rightly said, hope gives us something to look forward to, something that we anticipate will make the future better and increase our chances of overall happiness. Nevertheless, I don't always think hope is a worthwhile act, since it gives us false assurance that things will change, by us simply wishing for it. We must learn that hope alone is not enough for things to change; we must be active citizens who have the drive to want to create happiness, and not just 'hope' on it.


Can humans ever be hopeful too often? There are many things we hope for; hoping to pass the termly Chemistry test or hoping to call your grandmother tomorrow - it has become so easy for us to hope that the likelihood of such things alike will come true. These are just examples where we should not be hoping for these things to come true, but we should be acting upon them to make sure they come true, even if it means revising for 20 minutes longer for Chemistry, or calling your grandmother on the train to school instead of texting your friends. We should consider when hope is invaluable to us, at times where things are definitely out of our hands. When it comes to finding the cure for cancer or stopping supervolcanoes erupting, hope is all we have got, and that is when I think, hope is our best bet.

Hope...

Daffodils in the Spring are a time of hope. We hope after a dark winter that life will get better. In the school grounds we can see daffodils everywhere at this time of the year. Last week especially we were gifted with fine sunny weather and on certain lunchtimes you could have found me on a seat behind Gwyer reading the Oxford Book of English Verse. Can life have greater pleasures ?

Hope and fear are not mere words or facial gestures. They’re deeply felt neuro-chemical responses towards our current circumstances – that alter our outlooks, our actions, as well as the paths that unfold before us. Fear closes us down. Our actions become rigid and predictable. Pessimism overcomes us and drives our decisions. Our bleak outlooks bleed into our exchanges with family, friends, and colleagues, eroding any collective sense of safety or security. It is when we feel alone and isolated that we are at our most vulnerable. Fear’s negativity also seeps into our bodies and affects our health. We can feel it eating away at our stomachs, raising our stress hormones, and turning our shoulder and neck muscles twisted and stiff.

But what about hope? Do we truly know all that it offers? Can hope lead us out of these dark times?

Hope is not a typical form of being positive. Most positive emotions arise when we feel safe and full. Hope is the exception. It comes into play when our circumstances are dire – things are not going well or at least there’s considerable uncertainty about how things will turn out. Hope arises precisely within those moments when fear, hopelessness or despair seem just as likely. Perhaps we've just failed a test, or been pulled up because our work isn't good enough. Hope, in times like these, is what psychologist Richard Lazarus describes as “fearing the worst but yearning for better.”

Hope literally opens us up. It removes the blinders of fear and despair and allows us to see the big picture. We become creative, unleashing our aspirations for the future. This is because deep within the core of hope is the belief that things can change. No matter how awful or uncertain they are at the moment, things can turn out for the better. Possibilities exist. Belief in this better future sustains us. It keeps us from collapsing in despair. It motivates us to tap into our capabilities and inventiveness to turn things around. It inspires us to build a better future.

Anthropologist Lionel Tiger casts hope as the evolved answer to our big human forebrains. Unlike any other animal, we humans can envision our own futures and, in so doing, all the possible calamities. Without hope, our dire forecasts might reduce us to despair. Yet with hope, we become energised to do as much as we can to solve our current problem, to make a good life for ourselves and for others.

We face serious challenges in all aspects of our lives. The choice of hope over fear is pivotal for all of us. The more hope we cultivate today, the better equipped we’ll be to survive and thrive in the months and years ahead. We’re going to need the openness of hope to face our challenges with clear eyes and to find creative solutions that allow us to come through dark times stronger than ever. So let us be human – let us choose hope and build a better future.

Mr.Inger's Brain Puzzle...

A guest blog from Mr.Inger - are you clever enough to be able to read this ?

I have seen this with the letters out of order, but this is the first time I've seen it with numbers, F1gur471v3ly 5p34k1ng?

Good example of a Brain Study: If you can read this you have a strong mind:

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H0W 0UR M1ND5 C4N
D0 4M4Z1NG 7H1NG5!
1MPR3551V3 7H1NG5!
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17 WA5 H4RD BU7
N0W, 0N 7H15 LIN3
Y0UR M1ND 1S
R34D1NG 17
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W17H 0U7 3V3N
7H1NK1NG 4B0U7 17,
B3 PROUD! 0NLY
C3R741N P30PL3 C4N
R3AD 7H15.
PL3453 F0RW4RD 1F
U C4N R34D 7H15.

Resilience Be a Winner!

Resilience...Be a Winner!
Bouncing back... the harder you’re hit the harder you bounce back. Resilience is something that we all need and sometimes it takes real effort and courage.Research has shown that overcoming adversity is something that all children will do, to a greater or lesser extent. Those who are most resilient share similar characteristics and provide insight into how resilience can be cultivated in young people.
The development of resilience is none other than the process of healthy human development

Even for the best-cared for child, the world can seem full of adversity. Think back to some of the big challenges in your life: your first day at school, establishing friendships, your performance for the school sports team, your role in the Christmas pantomime, sitting tests, secondary school – then it starts all over again. Other major challenges for young people include coping with introductions to alcohol, drugs and sex. So, many major issues where we all need to show a degree of grit and resilience.

We’ve all made mistakes in some or all of those areas, but those who bounce back, dust themselves off and start all over again are the ones with resilience. ‘Getting it right’ and appearing ‘cool’ are very important to young people – and any form of failure can be a major set-back.

Research reveals that young people who have most resilience often share certain characteristics such as having:
• A support network in the shape of family, friends, colleagues, teachers etc
• Confidence that they can face up to new and challenging situations
• Enjoyed previous successes on which they can fall back on to remind them that they have overcome adversity in the past.
• Self-esteem where they know NOT to blame themselves.
Resilient children display the following characteristics:

Social competence
They are more responsive than non-resilient children; they bring out more positive responses from others; they are more active and adaptable than other children, even in infancy. Other attributes include a sense of humour (including the ability to laugh at themselves), empathy, caring and communication skills. As a result, they find it easier to form friendships. Studies of young people who face problems with drugs and alcohol reveal that they often lack friends and social competence.

Problem solving skills
The capacity for abstract thought, reflection, flexibility and a willingness to attempt alternative solutions are all signs of resilience. Research into some of the most disadvantaged youngsters in the world – street children – reveals strong planning skills if they are to survive the daily dangers and setbacks that life throws at them.

Autonomy
This about the ability to have a sense of your own identity, the capacity to act independently, and to exert some control over your environment. This is especially important for children living in dysfunctional families where drug addiction, alcohol abuse and mental illness make life very tough. The ability to separate themselves psychologically from their dysfunctional family, to see themselves as separate from their parents illnesses or addictions, or behaviours, gives such children a buffer that can allow them to continue their own development. Psychologists call this ‘adaptive distancing.’

A sense of purpose and future
Ambitions, goals, a desire for achievement, motivation, a desire for educational success, a belief that things will be better in the future, all of these are part of the make-up of the resilient child. Children with a strong ambition – such as achieving sporting excellence – are more able to resist peer pressure to experiment with drugs and alcohol. In a school like ours which encourages self-reliance and success every student can be a winner.

Werner & Smith, who carried out a 35-year study into resilience in children, summed up their findings by saying: 'The central component of effective coping with the multiplicity of inevitable life stresses appears to be a sense of coherence, a feeling of confidence that one's internal and external environment is predictable and that things will probably work out as well as can be reasonably expected.' (1982).

And they point out that the above attributes are the direct opposite of the ‘learned helplessness’ so often found in people suffering from mental illness or social problems. Other factors linked to resilience include being healthy and being female, since girls generally are more likely to show resilience than boys.

Our resilience level can be significantly enhanced, or depressed, by the attitudes of the people around us. If we believe that we can change our behaviour and that that we will do better then we will. Decide to be a winner now !

Noureen on Sadness and Divorce

Many thanks to Noureen for her comments on the 'sadness' and 'divorce' blogs. I am really impressed, as always, by the thoughtful and sensitive opinions of St.Helen's girls.

I once read a quotation that has always stuck by me, "Happiness is not something ready made, it comes from your own actions." This is something I believe in, even today, since happiness is contagious and there is no harm in spreading joy around to other people. After all, what benefits come out of being sad. Yes, one may grieve over a death or be sad about getting a B in an exam, but at the end of the day, life is about moving on, thinking about the future and keeping a positive outlook on the world around us. Otherwise, one might just live under a rock in sadness, which leaves us blinded from what the world has to give us.


Additionally, here is my contribution for 'Children, Masks and Divorce':-


I think that the "splitting" of parents can help a child become stronger as a person and learn to be more independant and mature, especially if the divorce takes place while the child is still in primary school. On the other hand, it also can make a child quite confused and possibly not as strong headed as others since they are in sense, masked, living 2 different lives in 2 different homes. Both parents may have different preferences of living their lives, along with how things are arranged in the home and what behaviour is acceptable in the house. The child would have to learn to adapt to different environments very quickly, so to not get in a muddle. I also agree that children from divorced parents would not want to show more sympathy for one parent over another, because this would upset their other parent, and we can't forget that children love both parents equally. Siding with one parent in an argument in one household would not be an issue; the issue arises when parents live in separate houses, since siding with parents is not public to the other parent, and this is where rumours and tales could start in the family. A child with divorce parents definitely has a lot to cope and deal with and it is all the more harder if the divorce is early on in childhood.

Children, Masks and Divorce

Children of divorcing parents tend to be good actors. They put on different masks to fit into their parents' different worlds.

I have been asked by some of you to look at issues surrounding children and divorce. This is a very sensitive issue and I am going to look at just one of the difficulties which can arise in belonging to two different households. Please email me if there are any further topics you are interested in.



All of us put on and take off masks depending on whom we're with. I once studied personality by studying letters that famous people in History had sent to various people in their lives. I looked at the letters that Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone had written to three different life-long friends, over the course of their lives. Both of them were British Prime ministers in the late nineteeth century. Each took on a different but consistent voice for each friend. Disraeli was tender, solicitous and humorous when writing to his wife but far more formal and aloof when writing to his colleagues.In other words, Disraeli was a different Disraeli depending upon his audience.Gladstone was more formal in all his correspondence. As Shakespeare remarked we are all actors with the world our stage.We play different roles, or different parts of our personality come into relief while others parts retreat. Young children of divorce might just have it worse than most: being one side of themselves with mum, and the other side with dad.



For example, I know a nine-year-old girl called "Arabella" who lives near to me who is caught between two of her selves. Her father left her mother and is now in a new relationship. The girl's mother, a bit nostalgic, would like to go back to the old marriage. When the child spends weekdays with her mother, she does her best to get close to her mother's world. She allows the sad side of herself to rise to the surface, regretting what's ending, saying she wished her parents were still a couple. But when she is with her father, every other weekend, she sides with her father by being more active, engaging with her father's new girlfriend with an exaggerated enthusiasm. She knows what each parents' respective worldview is, and she tries to fit into that view to have fun with that parent. She's performing roles, fuelled by what psychologists call "cognitive dissonance" the ability to hold two contradictory views at the same time: it's easier to believe in the atmosphere around us than to constantly fight it.



One massively confusing part of all this for a child is that she doesn't often know she's adapting to two different worlds. She just feels moody, and might blame herself for that moodiness: she thinks she's sometimes really depressed and sometimes too buoyant, and doesn't know why other people don't experience such dramatic shifts of mood. She resists recognising that she's playing roles to please two parents who are very different from each other.



Children of divorce experience a split existence: they may say that they feel like different people with each of their parents, that their parents are polar opposites (even when they're not), that they need to keep more secrets from their parents than other children do, and that they don't want to resemble one of their parents too much, because it might alienate them from the other parent.Children of divorce may experience early pressure to create their own moral systems, because they cannot wholeheartedly endorse the rules of two different households.



For many children there is no such thing as a "good divorce." But there is a chance that some of the difficulties of divorce can strengthen personality traits in a child. Unfortunately, these children are forced into a form of adolescent "splitting"--keeping two sides of their personality in two different realms. But they are also forced to create their own code of behaviour. If they are able to move from a world of "splitting" (dancing between two radically different selves) toward a world in which these various masks are integrated, perhaps they find themselves with a more varied toolbox for approaching life than many of us have.

What do you think ? I would be interested in your views you can contact me on school email.

The Beauty of Sadness

The first, I hope, of many guest blogs. Mr.Nanton explores how sadness can enrich and bring meaning to our lives.

The Beauty Of Sadness
By DAVID NANTON
We live in a society obsessed with the concept of happiness. We’re constantly prodded with questions: Are you happy? Why not? Why don’t you do something to make yourself happy?
Happiness seems almost to have become a product. Our highly industrialised and celebrity culture has taken lifestyle branding to a level where many of us have internalised the images we see to the point of viewing our lives and experiences through a media filter. As one character in the movie The Joneses explains, “If people want you, they’ll want what you’ve got.” This mediated view of our lives then begins to define our concept of happiness.
The consequence of this is a disconnect. The media-fuelled ideal of happiness leaves little room for exploring our other emotions and truly connecting with others and the world around us. Sadness and other “negative” emotions are perceived as unnatural and malignant. The melancholy are often treated as ‘abnormal’ and encouraged to do whatever it takes to stop them feeling that way. Sometimes this means using anti-depressant drugs or other substances to physically change their mood.
True, we all want to achieve our ideal of happiness. True, also, there are those with genuine emotional problems who need clinical help and even medication. But what about those people who embrace and experience the full spectrum of emotion? Do their life experiences — which may provide joy but also supply pain and suffering — make them better people? Do all our emotions not have equal validity? If so, why are we so down on being down?
Some years ago, I was lent a book called Swallowed by the Snake. It compared dealing with sadness to an old Indian story of a village that was being terrorised by an enormous snake that continued to carry off its inhabitants and eat them. A young man went into the jungle with just a knife and a bag of rice. He was swallowed by the snake but rather than fight it, he allowed himself to get accustomed to the darkness and confinement of the snake’s belly — and slowly cut off pieces of the snake from the inside until he had worked his way through and into the light.
What I gained from the story was that there is no real quick fix, no way to fight sadness. All we can do is work through it. Only then are we truly able to appreciate the beauty and treasures of those moments of happiness that came before and since. The French poet Louis Aragon expressed it thus:
Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make it pungent, intoxicating. We only exist in terms of this conflict, in the zone where black and white clash.
So it’s not merely the moments of sadness or happiness that define our lives: it’s the conflict and opposition that does so, and how we respond is what brings out our real character. Sadness, after all, is an unavoidable part of the human experience. We all taste it — relationships turn sour, possessions get stolen or lost, loved ones die. Loss is the inevitable consequence of attachment, so if we are unwilling to feel the extent of our emotions we build walls around ourselves. Subconsciously, we know that forming a new attachment could bring us future grief, so we avoid real connection. Instead, we accumulate wealth and possessions or learn to be impressive in other ways to attract false friends, but it doesn’t address the problem.
Living consciously through sadness and finding its beauty gives us the courage to be open to the world and all its hidden dangers. It’s the fear of uncomfortable feelings that causes so much anxiety and depression. Embracing our emotions and learning not to resist them or judge them allows us to process the events of our lives.
This often gives us the opportunity to recognise our inner strength. Out of sadness we can be inspired to be better. Not that we should actively seek it out, of course, or revel in being morose. In fact, it’s understandable to recoil. But when the low moments of our lives do come, we could also grit our teeth, bear the trauma and say, “Yes, I will grieve. Life is unfair. Now let me figure out what I can do to ease the pain.” That may involve reaching out and connecting with others. As we do so, we encourage and fit into each other’s lives. Thus, in adversity, satisfaction can be found in relating to and serving one another, building relationships either temporary or lasting, and finding a useful role to perform. We dig the trenches together.
Some of the worst experiences of my life have always been made into fonder memories when I think back to those with whom I shared those moments. Maybe it’s the Shackleton phenomena — even in seemingly hopeless scenarios, there can be beauty and heroism in a shared struggle.
The thing is, we’ve been taught to hide our sadness from others, and eventually we learn to hide it from ourselves. So we never learn the skill of simply experiencing it for what it is and letting it take its natural course — it pulls at us all our lives, driving us to try harder to achieve our media-driven ideals of happiness, when all the time it is there, waiting for us, offering us an alternative path which allows us to go with the flow of our emotions, instead of resisting all the time.
If we follow that path, the inevitable discovery we make is that our emotions dissipate and integrate as we allow them to be. From that follows peace of mind, which is the real reward, the real happiness we crave.
Many of us mistake the absence of sadness, or the presence of excitement and external stimulation, for happiness. But the real thing is a much deeper thrill — that of being truly alive to this cruel but beautiful world.
There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year’s course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word ‘happy’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness. - Carl Jung

Art and Beauty

THOU still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fringed legend haunts about thy shape 5
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

From Keats ‘Ode on a Grecian urn’ what makes these lines beautiful and poignant ? In this blog I’m going to touch upon the ideas of art and beauty and why they are so important to us and to our psychological well-being. From the time of the ancient Greeks until the early twentieth century it was taken for granted that art, literature and music could enrich human lives. Great art was believed to have the power to elevate the emotions and sensibility and to transcend the mundane everyday world. In the early twentieth century there was a change in human consciousness in the west. For many art, music and literature became a dead end and only new and experimental ideas were considered to be capable of explaining the world after the horror of the First World war.. This war with the carnage on the western front had undermined an easy belief in truth and beauty.
Modernism in music, in literature and in art – threw the rule book away and attempted to interpret the world through the horror of contemporary experience. James Joyce, one of the great modernist authors wrote ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ this is a short extract:

“Sir Tristram, violer d'amores, fr'over the short sea, had passen- 4
core rearrived from North Armorica on this side the scraggy 5

isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight his penisolate war: nor 6

had topsawyer's rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse 7

to Laurens County's gorgios while they went doublin their mumper 8

all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to 9

tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venissoon after, had a 10

kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all's fair in 11

vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone nathandjoe. “

Maybe only a new language could try to express new thoughts?

Or, modernist artists like the German expressionists:

sought to challenge accepted views of art as representation.
Even more recently post-modernism sees value as being in the eye of the beholder, not a quality in the work itself. To adopt this approach is to see a Batman comic as holding the same value as the works of Shakespeare.We are in danger of replacing the high and noble ideals which art and education were always concerned with, with stuff which means nothing. Our capacity for happiness and mental health depends upon our capacity to experience all that is best in human thought and culture.

My own belief is that we have a need for what we hope will increase our sensitivity to and understanding of the world. It may be something which will give us a new perspective, a sense of beauty or an insight into the sublime. So, I do not think that a song by ‘One Direction’ is in any sense the equal of Schubert lieder ,Andy Warhol the equal of Michelangelo or a Batman comic the equal of ‘War and Peace’. There is great art which elevates and raises our consciousness and trivia which does not.
I would be interested in your views please write to me by school email. The Google reply does not seem to work in school for some reason. I will do a posting of your replies and comments after the blog has been published.
Dr.Brown