HOW TO GET SMARTER IN A WEEK

According to research by a BBC program, sticking to the following schedule potentially aids in making you up to 40 per cent cleverer within seven days:

Saturday: Brush your teeth with your ‘wrong’ hand and take a shower with your eyes closed.

Sunday: Do the crossword or Sudoku puzzle in your Sunday paper and take a brisk walk.

Monday: Have oily fish for dinner, and either cycle, walk or take the bus into work.

Tuesday: Select unfamiliar words from the dictionary and work them into conversations.

Wednesday: Go to yoga, Pilates or a meditation class, and talk to someone you don’t know.

Thursday: Take a different route to work; watch Countdown or Brainteaser.

Friday: Avoid caffeine or alcohol; memorize your shopping list.

CAN SHORT-TERM MEMORY BE VISIBLE?

Psychologists from the University of Oregon recently found that they can literally see just what information people are holding in their short-term memory, based only on patterns of activity in the brain.

By analyzing blood-flow activity, they were able to identify the specific color or orientation of an object that was intentionally stored by the observer.

The experiments involved the subjects viewing a stimulus object for one second, and holding a specific aspect of that object in mind after it disappeared. In 10-second delays after each exposure, researchers recorded brain activity during memory selection and storage processing.

If subjects were remembering orientation, then that pattern of activity during the 10-second delay period had no information about color.

Likewise, if they chose to remember color, researchers were able to even decode which color they remembered, but orientation information was missing.

Subsequently, an algorithm was being used to predict exactly what someone is remembering based on these activation patterns!

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