Cognitive stimulation comes in a variety of types: intellectual/mental, physical, or social. Older adults are encouraged to find leisure activities they enjoy doing, and to continue pursuing them for the purpose of joyful meaning-making, and enhancing subjective well being. But... View Article
Author Archives for Linda H
A remarkable new study by Evelina Fedorenko’s research group, published in Nature Neuroscience, showed that brain regions associated with language processing in native English speakers were also activated in speakers of 45 other different languages, while they were engaging in... View Article
More and more people are using their phones for a multitude of tasks such as making online and in-person purchases, creating events, scheduling reminders, tracking tasks, and virtual meetings. All these functions are in addition to those for which people... View Article
Results from the latest Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) reading assessment have indicated that a quarter of Ontario’s grade 3 students are failing to meet reading standards for their age group. Erin Panda, an assistant professor in the Department... View Article
Medicine professor Maxim Bazhenov of the University of California San Diego recently published a study with colleagues in the Journal of Neuroscience that provides insight into the sleep mechanisms that may give rise to relational memory. In the study, researchers... View Article
We are living in an era where biomedical research has advanced exponentially – to the extent of being able to roll out and distribute a vaccine to millions within just months of the declaration of a pandemic. As scientists gather... View Article
Emily Moorhead is a kindergarten teacher whose son in grade 1 was exhibiting early signs of dyslexia, a type of learning disability. Even as an elementary school educator, she still felt that she didn’t have the skills to help her... View Article
Overshadowed by the COVID-19 pandemic, we are also facing a reading crisis. Children are not learning to read properly and/or are falling behind in regard to the curriculum standards expected of them. Teachers are struggling to do enough to take... View Article
High quality sleep is a must if you want to remember peoples’ names and faces
January 12, 2022 11:00 amResearchers from Northwestern University have discovered the key to improving recall of names and faces – and it’s simpler than you would think. The answer is deep restful sleep. Nathan Whitmore, a PhD candidate in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience program, is... View Article
Memories from traumatic life experiences may show up in the brain differently
January 10, 2022 11:00 pmIn psychology and neuroscience, many scholars and students alike are familiar with the saying “neurons that fire together, wire together”. This catchphrase was popularized after the discovery of Hebb’s rule, in relation to long term potentiation and neural synaptic plasticity. However,... View Article
Would it make a difference if you reward yourself during initial learning (encoding), or during retrieval? Cognitive psychology textbooks present long-term memory processing as a series of steps. First, when learning a new piece of information it enters the encoding... View Article
A research study authored by psychology professor Ellen Bialystok and colleagues from York University sought to determine whether language learning was effective at boosting cognitive health among older adults. Participants between 65-75 years old, all of whom were monolingual English... View Article
A news article summarizes results from three neuroscientific research papers that provide evidence-based strategies to enhance memory consolidation. The first paper suggests that if you would like to enhance your memory for prospective events or information, start asking yourself whether... View Article
As the world becomes more reliant on technology, beginning as early as kindergarten and extending all the way to post-secondary school, it’s hard to escape the ubiquity of tech’s influence on one’s educational journey. This is even more pronounced as... View Article
During the COVID-19 pandemic, school lockdowns and the shift to learning in a remote virtual format led to increased uncertainty, burnout amongst teachers and setbacks for many, as education was seemingly put to a halt. Students with neurological learning challenges... View Article
Librarians play an important role in supporting individuals in learning how to access research databases and to become more literate in digital media. Yet according to recent statistics published by Antioch University Seattle in the School Librarian Investigation Decline of... View Article
University students are made well aware of the importance of having a consistent sleep schedule, and the role that high quality sleep plays in cognitive performance. But how can shorter breaks improve memory? Are rest periods of just a few... View Article
Neuroscientist Nathan Michaels makes the analogy that brains are like machines. In this article, he states that all machines are made of a combination of structural elements that work together to produce a specific function. Machines also require inputs in... View Article
There is a popular belief that the left brain is the logical, rational and analytical side of the brain, while the right hemisphere is associated with emotion and creativity. Perhaps building on this idea of lateralization, some also hold that... View Article