Best Practices

Recently, I made a commitment to myself to start building cognitive reserve in a bid to protect myself against age-related brain degradation. I know that if I attempt to make too many big changes to my routine, chances are, I will not maintain them. Since the goal is life-long change, I need to implement them in a way that ensures the greatest success of sticking.

Taking a leaf out of James Clear’s Atomic Habits, I wanted to start with the things I already do and find ways to tweak them so they are cognitively challenging. The harder I can make it, the better it will be for my brain. Unfortunately, this old brain struggles to learn a lot of things these days so everything feels hard. To help me along, I started looking into methods that will enhance the learning; make it more effective. Since the goal is to work the brain, there is nothing that says I can’t employ techniques that have proven to help me learn better.

When my children were younger, I looked into this topic for their benefit. Who would have guessed that it would actually come in handy for me now? While there are numerous techniques I could implement, I decided to follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple Stupid) and start with three. I felt that these were easy enough to implement, and especially suited to the activities I am currently working on: more complex boxing routines, and a new language acquisition.

• Spaced Learning
• Practice Before Sleep
• Visualisation or Mental Rehearsal

Spaced Learning

Spaced learning is a technique that utilises three 15-20 minute learning sessions separated by two 10-minute breaks between the sessions. It follows the finding that we learn better when our brain cells are switched on and off. By switching our brain cells “on” (during learning) and “off” again (during breaks), our unconscious has time to internalise the knowledge and the repetition results in long-term memories.

A study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that the spaced learning method produced significantly higher results compared to study following traditional methods.

Practice Before Sleep

Researchers found that motor memories—our brain’s way of holding on to skills and actions—are not just consolidated over time, but they can be significantly enhanced when sleep closely follows practice.

Psypost

A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience found that if we sleep shortly after practicing a motor skill (within an hour), we can further enhance the learning of that skill above and beyond the effects of practice alone. The finding in the study was reported to be a 30% enhancement.

Visualisation or Mental Rehearsal

A study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology found that we can mentally rehearse a skill with significant results compared to practicing the skill physically. This can be beneficial for adding in extra practice sessions in place of the times when we are unable to complete the practice physically.

The key points to be aware of with this practice:

• Make it as real as possible – play it in your mind like a movie in the first person’s perspective. Make it as vivid as possible – include all your other senses into the mental experience.
• Perfect practice – visualise perfect executions only.
• Add a “dry run” movement – adding movement to your practice can increase its effectiveness.