Strengthening memory with high effectiveness in these ways

Strengthening memory with high effectiveness in these ways

1. Better lighting

MSU researchers discovered that one type of lab rat "lost about 30 percent of the capacity in the hippocampus, a brain region important for learning and memory, and performed poorly on a spatial task they had previously trained, because they were kept in dim lighting."

Therefore, experts advise improving lighting in the workplace and at home.

2. Puzzles and crossword puzzles

Writing in the journal NEJM Evidence, Davanger Devanand, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Columbia University, and Murali Duriswamy, a professor of psychiatry and medicine at Duke University, said they studied 107 volunteers over 78 weeks. In short, they found that test subjects who were asked to do crossword puzzles regularly performed significantly better on memory loss (or lack thereof) than those who were asked to spend a similar amount of time playing video games.

3. Intermittent fasting

“This is how you can grow new brain cells,” confirmed Dr. Sandrine Thorette, head of the Laboratory of Adult Neurogenesis and Mental Health, in a video entitled: “This is how you can grow new brain cells.” Intermittent fasting “improved long-term memory retention” compared to two other groups of mice that were fed as-is, or even on calorie-restricted diets.

4. Walking backwards

Researchers at the University of Roehampton in England conducted six experiments to determine whether simply walking backwards could lead to a better ability to remember things using short-term memory. Indeed, the six experiments succeeded, as “the results showed for the first time that movement-induced mental time travel directed in the past improved memory performance for different types of information. Dr Alexander Aksentjevic, from the Department of Psychology at the University of Roehampton, said the experiments were dubbed the "time travel effect".

5. More fruits and vegetables

Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health studied eating habits over two decades and found that participants who ate more fruits and vegetables — especially those who ate more dark orange vegetables, red vegetables, leafy greens and berries — had better memory later in life. .

6. Reading for pleasure

Among the more recent studies, researchers from the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology at the University of Illinois set out to determine whether there are cognitive habits that might go beyond solving puzzles and crossword puzzles in the development of memory. The researchers discovered that reading for pleasure, five days a week, about 90 minutes at a time, could "enhance older people's memory skills" better than puzzles.

7. Get enough sleep

The results of a study conducted at the Institute of Chronobiology and Sleep at the University of Pennsylvania revealed that humans suffer from a “deficit … in vigilance and episodic memory” due to poor sleep quality.

The person also loses the ability to self-judgment as one of the negative effects of lack of sleep, advising that the only way to overcome these problems is to make sleep a priority.

8. Develop detailed hobbies

Findings from a Canadian study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, indicate that when researchers tried to determine whether people who became deeply interested in detail-oriented hobbies could experience improvements in their memory over time.

In short, the researchers found that people who engage in detailed hobbies, such as bird watching, and who tend to describe and store memories according to more detailed criteria, had better memory and cognitive abilities than the rest of the study participants.

Perhaps the explanation, said one researcher, is that "the more one knows one's background, the better one is at learning and retaining new information by scaffolding that information to existing knowledge."