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Can You Reuse Your Memory Palace or Number Rhymes?

January 24, 2017January 24, 2017 by Helmut

In this post, we look at when and how you can reuse a memory palace or a peg list such as the number rhymes to memorize multiple sets of information. We will go through an example where using the same locations multiple times works like a charm and look at other situations where you should rather use a different room or peg list.

In the following, I will mostly talk about locations along a journey or in a room in a memory palace. However, the same applies also to peg lists like the number rhymes and the number shapes. I have written a post on the memory palace technique, also known as the method of loci, in case you are not yet familiar with it. At times, I will also refer to locations as loci. These two terms mean exactly the same: Loci is the plural of locus, the Latin origin of the word location.

The question of re-using a memory palace can refer to two very different cases. We will cover both of them.

You have already used the locations in a room or along a journey to memorize a set of information for long-term use. Now you are wondering whether you can add a second set to the same loci or should rather use a different room or memory palace.
You have used the locations for short-term memorization and hope to overwrite the information in these locations with new information.

Can you safely add an additional set of information to a room in which you have already stored information for long-term use?

The Bose QC35 Wireless Headphones – A Practical Review

June 6, 2018January 9, 2017 by Helmut

A couple of months ago, a friend let me try his Bose QuietComfort 35 noise-cancelling headphones in a coffee shop. They were playing some fast-paced music with a pronounced thumping bass through the store’s sound system. To my astonishment, with the QC35 on, the annoying bass almost completely disappeared. It was as if someone had removed the sub-woofer from the sound system. I was pleasantly surprised.

Low-frequency noise annoys me and stresses me out, so over the years I have looked at many options to remove rumbling machines, humming air conditioners, traffic noise, and sudden impulse noise from my environment.

I have also done a few experiments that showed me how greatly a noise-free environment can improve cognitive performance. So you can imagine these Bose headphones got my attention.

Natural Project Planning to the Rescue

January 4, 2017January 4, 2017 by Helmut

There are plenty of project planning approaches and software tools out there. But when do you actually use them? For most of us they are overwhelming and overkill. Getting caught up in complexity, we often miss the point.

On the other hand, not planning at all, and hence not knowing how to bridge the gap between one’s current place and a desired outcome, often leaves us lost in the woods and breeds procrastination. I have “occasionally” 🙄 experienced this myself and observed plenty of people in my work and private circles idling and killing time.

Fortunately, our brain knows quite well how to plan and execute a project. Once you make this planning process explicit, you realize that it doesn’t have to be complicated at all and are more likely to make a plan. And yes, very often it will fit on a paper napkin. You are also more likely to question why you are doing something.

So how does our brain plan naturally?

On Getting Stuck, Procrastinating, and Pulling Your Cart out of the Mud

December 24, 2016December 20, 2016 by Helmut

You don’t seem to be getting anywhere. You only slept 5 hours last night, and now you are tired. You have to write another chapter of your paper or another blog post, but the ideas just aren’t coming and the research seems too hard.

Yet, you want your next article to be great. You hold yourself to a high standard, so you won’t just write some crap – just to be done with it.

You realize that nothing great can ever be accomplished in one go, that you need to take steps, learn and research individual pieces, and get on top of new concepts to create something of value. But – everything seems to be so high up in the clouds, out of reach. Will it even be worth the effort?

Well, now you have time. So you might as well start somewhere and do something else but procrastinating. Read a little article that gets you further. Start writing something. Shoot a question from the hip and outline the answer, even if you don’t know much about the topic yet. Having something concrete in front of you will point you in the right direction.

Why am I procrastinating again?

Is White Noise Good for Studying and Work?

January 26, 2018December 3, 2016 by Helmut

Generally Yes, but it depends…

It depends on you, the kind of white noise you are using, the task you are working on, where you work, and even the time of day. This post looks at some of the intricacies and helps you to decide whether, when, and how to use white noise for your work and studying.

Speech and varying-state noise (e.g., typical office noise) are distracting and can significantly impair mental performance:

Experiments have shown that cognitive abilities important for both studying and cognitive work are negatively affected by noise: This includes serial memory (remembering the order of things), reading comprehension, mental arithmetic, proof-reading, and writing.

Most of these studies have included silence as a control condition. Some experiments have also included white noise for comparison. The results for white noise were ambiguous: White noise was mostly but not always benign.

My take is, compared to silence, it didn’t affect the average (!) participant’s performance negatively, but it also didn’t boost it.

However, people respond differently to white noise. Some people and tasks thrive on it, while others are slightly negatively affected. Read on to find out who benefits.

How to Block out Snoring Noise

April 3, 2019November 16, 2016 by Helmut

In my previous post, I explored how day-time noise impairs our cognitive performance and what we can do about it. But there is another big elephant in the room – our night-time sleep. Sleep or the lack of it has a big impact on our ability to perform at our best, both physically and mentally.

Less or disrupted slow-wave sleep, for example, entails poor memory and poor wound healing.

Among the worst offenders interrupting our night-time sleep is the all too familiar sound of SNORING. Snoring can be loud – very loud indeed. A loud snorer can reach more than 90 decibels of peak sound pressure level. That is about as loud as a lawn mower.

Intrigued by the capabilities of some of the newer devices to block out noise and sophisticated white noise apps, I decided to run an experiment to answer this question: What is the best way to block out snoring noise?

Test equipment and candidates

An iPad equipped with a sound level meter (Noisee for iOS).
Two different white noise apps: myNoise for iOS and White Noise by Tmsoft for iOS and Android.
Earplugs of different sizes by Hearos, 3M, and Mack with a noise reduction rating (NRR) of 29-33 (an NRR of 33 is about as good as you can get).
Good-quality earbuds (a good fit is vital for sound quality and noise isolation).
The best earmuffs I could find, with a noise reduction rating of 31 (3M Peltor X5A).
DIY noise isolating earbuds and sleep headphones.
The best noise cancelling headphones I could find (Bose Quiet Comfort QC35).

Testing the snore blocking effectiveness

How to Block out Noise before It Kills Your Work and Study Performance

October 21, 2016October 21, 2016 by Helmut

Noise affects you as a professional, office worker, teacher, and student. It impairs your ability to read and write effectively, remember what you have learned, and do math. Everyday noise can cause a performance loss of 50 percent or more. This is easily the difference between an A and an F. Luckily there are some smart ways to block out and mask noise so it doesn’t disrupt you.

A good 18 months ago, I was sitting on my balcony watching an online lecture on my computer. My balcony is facing a small aisle, but the traffic noise from a nearby road is still very noticeable. I was wearing decent earbuds, so the noise wasn’t bothering me – or so I thought.

Just out of curiosity, I put on a pair of earmuffs, which I had purchased earlier to block out noises that often startle me during my early-afternoon naps.

Well, they did a hell of a job with the traffic noise: I was sitting there, and all the honking, squeaking and rumbling had receded into the background. It wasn’t completely quiet, but everything was so faint. That’s very nice indeed, I thought.

Why not try continuing the lecture with my earbuds underneath the earmuffs?

The first thing I noticed was that the voice of the lecturer was now way too loud. Annoyingly loud.

I had to turn down the volume from 10 to 3 to make it comfortable again. I also noticed that I could hear the finer nuances of the lecturer’s voice. I could even understand other students’ questions. These students weren’t equipped with microphones as this was a normal computer science lecture recorded at MIT in a big lecture hall (part of MIT’s Open Courseware program).

Wow – it was so much easier to follow the lecture and take in the whole experience. One of the great advantages of watching a recorded lecture is that you can stop it and re-listen to parts you couldn’t comprehend the first time. After putting on the earmuffs, this became almost completely unnecessary. Not only was I able to listen at a much lower volume and make out previously unheard details, I was also comprehending faster!

Bolstered by that experience, I experienced with earmuffs in other learning and reading situations as well

How to Take the Perfect Nap for Performance, Mood and Memory

October 8, 2016September 24, 2016 by Helmut

I have been an afternoon napper for more than 14 years. I started napping after moving to a country where most people took a siesta. For various reasons, I just couldn’t get enough sleep during the night, so it was easy to fall asleep.

Over the years, I have tried short power naps, 60-minute naps, and occasionally 90-minute mid-afternoon sleeps. In this post, I would like to share with you how to nap for better mood, alertness, concentration, improved memory, and restoration of learning capacity. We will cover how long and when to nap for maximum benefit, how to avoid after-nap grogginess (sleep inertia), and the possible risks associated with longer naps.

As a final point, I am going to share my personal napping experience and my favorite napping hacks.

The benefits of napping are numerous

For me personally, the most important benefits are improved mood and decreased sleepiness. I just feel happier and ready to tackle my afternoon after a nap.

Napping studies have found a large number and variety of benefits of napping in all kinds of workplace and operational settings. Studies looked at drivers, commercial airliner pilots, shift workers, doctors and nurses, students, children, senior citizens…

Here is a non-exhaustive list of research-proven benefits:

Improved cognitive performance
- Increased alertness and concentration
- Decreased reaction time
- Speed and accuracy improvement on cognitive tasks
Better mood
Less sleepiness and fatigue
Significantly reduced number of driving incidents such as drifting out of one’s lane in a car simulator experiment: the number of incidents caused by drivers who had taken a 15-minute coffee nap (see below for details) was 91% less than for drivers who had just taken a break. Coffee alone reduced the number of incidents by 66%.
In a NASA study, pilots who took naps were able to maintain their performance and reduce incidents during a demanding multi-day schedule. Pilots who weren’t allowed to nap experienced deceasing performance and a significantly larger number of incidents, including during the descent and landing.
Significantly Improved memory and protection of learned information from interference: a study that focused on declarative learning found a 60% increased memory retention for nappers at a final test one week after initial learning, compared to learners who hadn’t napped.
Nappers perform better at abstracting general concepts and making connections that weren’t directly learned but can be inferred from what was learned (relational memory).
A nap can restore the capacity to learn, which otherwise deteriorates considerably with time awake.
Performance on a creative problem solving task where subjects had to find a linking word between three seemingly unrelated words was improved by more than 40% after a 90-minute nap containing REM sleep (see below) compared to rest and naps containing only non-REM sleep.

To better understand what nap length you should aim for, here is a sleep architecture primer

How to Create, Extract, and Manage PDF Annotations and Highlights

April 20, 2016April 20, 2016 by Helmut

An efficient workflow for annotating PDFs, extracting highlights and comments, and filing them is essential for research, writing, and studying. Ideally highlights and comments should contain back-links that take you right back to the correct page in the PDF source document.

Adobe’s Acrobat Reader DC, PDF-XChange Editor, and various other PDF readers allow you to annotate PDF files. But, you don’t want these annotations to remain “imprisoned” in your PDF. Your highlights and comments become a lot more useful if you can extract them, aggregate markups from several documents, and re-find them when you need them. Unsurprisingly, the free version of Acrobat Reader doesn’t allow the export of annotations as a word or text file.

To accomplish this in an elegant way, I recommend that you manage your PDF documents in Zotero, a free, open-source research document management system created and maintained by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (George Mason University). With Zotero, you can collect and organize a large variety of document types, including PDF documents and web pages with the click of a few buttons.
To extract and manage PDF annotations in Zotero, you additionally need the free add-on Zotfile from zotfile.com. Zotfile was created by Joscha Legewie, a professor at New York University. A big thank you to Dr. Legewie for programming and maintaining this excellent cannot-live-without add-on!

How to Improve Focus and Concentration and Enjoy a Happy Morning

March 26, 2016March 26, 2016 by Helmut

In this post, I want to share my secret to enjoyable and productive days. The short form of the formula goes like this: prepare and drink a strong cup of butter coffee; meditate for 10 to 30 minutes; eat a protein-rich breakfast on some days and skip breakfast on other days; and finally, use timeboxing to alternate between 30-minute bursts of work and 5-to-10-minute breaks.

This formula keeps my energy levels up and helps to maintain focus and concentration throughout the day. Best of all, when I consequently apply it, I still have plenty of energy to spare in the evening.

Does this sound too good to be true? If you suffer from brain fog, low energy, or a lack of focus and concentration, or crave sugar or food to keep you going, give it a try.

Here is how I implement the different steps of my formula: