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August 10 - November 1, 2023
One part of your brain is particularly important for remembering facts and events. It’s called the hippocampus.*
Technically, the brain has two hippocampi—one on the left and the other on the right side of the brain.
Your cerebral cortex is the home of your long-term memory (locker).
When you exercise, your brain makes a chemical called BDNF.
“BDNF” is really short for “brain-derived neurotrophic factor.”
BDNF makes your new neurons strong and healthy.3 It protects them from injury and makes them more likely to connect to other neurons. It also acts like a food for synapses and dendritic spines, making them grow larger.
Vegetables from the onion family, which includes garlic and leeks, contain chemicals that help keep away all sorts of diseases, from diabetes to cancer. So do vegetables from the cabbage family,
Sometimes you feel featherbrained as you’re trying to look away and recall a key idea. Or you find yourself reading the same paragraphs over and over again. When this happens, do something physical—for example, a few sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, or cartwheels. These can have a surprisingly positive effect on your ability to understand and recall.
Practicing different aspects and techniques of the skill you are trying to learn is called interleaving.
When you interleave with different topics, you can almost feel your brain go, Wait a minute, what’s this? I didn’t expect to go back to that other stuff! But then you’ll notice how you begin to see differences between the topics in ways you hadn’t previously imagined.
Lady Luck favors the one who tries.
So, if you can, it’s better to study in a variety of places!
If you imagine hearing a famous person from history speaking to you, or you visualize a chemical, that counts as multisensory learning, which is the most effective kind. For everyone.
but just being awake creates nasty toxic products in your brain. The longer you’re awake, the more the toxins build up. What an awful thought!
When you go to sleep, your neurons shrink, which allows the toxins to be washed away.
in general you should have at least eight hours a night reserved for “sleep opportunity time”—that is, time to both fall asleep and be asleep.*4 These eight hours of sleep opportunity time should be consistent during the week—it’s not the kind of thing you try to catch up on over the weekends.
Not sleeping enough can have long-term consequences that are similar to eating arsenic. Lack of sleep allows toxic products to build up all over your body, makes you more prone to getting sick, to getting cancer, and to all sorts of mental problems.
quieter music with no words can sometimes be helpful, depending on what you are studying.
Action video games are great for focusing. While you’re having fun, you’re also learning to concentrate.
Action video games also improve your vision in some ways. You learn to pick out details better than people who don’t play action-style video games. You can even see better in the fog!
Games like Tetris can build your spatial (“SPAY-shell”) abilities. That means you can learn to rotate things more easily in your mind’s eye. This is an important skill in math and science.
In fact, if you’re passionate about anything, you can become even better at your passion if you also learn a little bit about something quite different.
Whatever you learn, your brain finds a way to make those ideas useful for your main passion, often through metaphor. This important learning idea is called transfer.
If you review your notes one last time before you go to sleep, you can make your dendritic spines grow even better while you sleep!
When you begin your test, here’s what you should do. Start by quickly looking it over. Make a little checkmark beside what you think are the hardest problems. Then pick one of the hard problems and start working on it. Yes, that’s right—a hard problem. (Eat your frogs first!)
if tests stress you out, it’s especially important for you to practice recall in your studies.
