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Improve Short-term Memory,Long-term Memory, Visual Memory and Auditory Memory Memory is the retention of information over time. There are many kinds of memory: short-term memory, long-term memory, visual memory and auditory memory, to name but a few. These four kinds of memory are foundational skills of learning and improving them is fundamental towards overcoming learning disabilities. Short-term memory or working memory lasts from a few seconds to a minute; the exact amount of time may vary somewhat. When you are trying to recall a telephone number that was heard a few seconds earlier, the name of a person who has just been introduced, or the substance of the remarks just made by a teacher in class, you are calling on short-term memory, or working memory. Long-term memory lasts from a minute or so to weeks or even years. From long-term memory you can recall general information about the world that you learned on previous occasions, memory for specific past experiences, specific rules previously learned, and the like. Visual memory is a person?s ability to remember what he has seen, while auditory memory is a person?s ability to remember what he has heard. While visual memory deficiencies are inclined to affect reading and spelling, students with auditory memory deficiencies will often experience difficulty developing a good understanding of words, remembering terms and information that has been presented orally, for example, in history and science classes. It is widely accepted that learning-disabled students have poor memories. In their article in the Learning Disabilities Quarterly Scruggs and Mastropieri state, ?One of the most commonly described characteristics of learning-disabled students is their failure to remember important information.? The problem with learning disabilities experts, however, is that they view memory as a ?fafrotsky? ? a word coined by Ivan T. Sanderson, and standing for ?Things that?FAll FROm The SKY.? For centuries it was believed that memory can be improved. The Greeks, and later the Romans, developed some of the most prodigious memories the civilized world has ever seen. Memory was ranked as one of the most important disciplines of oratory, a flourishing art at the time. They lived in an age with no paper, so people couldn?t readily refer to notes. Speeches were committed to memory; lawyers depended on their memory in court; and poets, whose roles in society was paramount, regularly drew on their enormous powers of recall to recite long passages of verse. The Greeks in general had a high level of literacy. Important texts were recorded on papyrus, and wax tablets were used to teach reading and writing in schools. Nevertheless, their culture remained a predominantly oral one. While it is still accepted that it is the ability to recall to memory that makes learning possible, it is nowadays widely ? and falsely ? believed that biology decides whether a person has a good memory or a bad one, and those who believe that memory can be improved are ridiculed. In his book, Making the Words Stand Still, Sleep and sleepingBODY-TEMPERATURE AND SLEEP RHYTHMSDay and night alternate over 24 hours due to the rotation of the planet, and the start and length of daylight varies with the seasons. So internal biological clocks (controllers) evolved for controlling activities related to the environment such as those of cold-blooded animals which need to maintain their body temperature by warming themselves in the sun. Reptiles are cold-blooded animals warmed by the daylight sun and conserve energy by restricting activities when it is dark. And the biological clock which controls their activity-rest cycle is located within the eye. But about 180 million years ago, warm-blooded mammals evolved from their cold-blooded reptilian ancestors by developing the ability to maintain a constant body temperature by biological processes. This freed them from depending on daylight and the weather for survival. Deep sleep appeared at the same time. The earlier mammals were reproducing themselves by hatching their young out of eggs. But about 180 to 130 million years ago, many mammals evolved into giving birth directly from the womb, their young being born alive after having been developed for a considerable period within the womb. Their young have to grow and learn much for a long time before they can survive independently, for many years in the case of human beings. The human brain now has much greater learning capacity. In mammals, information about light and darkness is transmitted from the eye to a biological clock, now situated in the mammalian brain, which controls the sleep-wakefulness rhythm. Another biological clock controls the body-temperature rhythm, and these biological clocks together control the related body-temperature and sleep-wakefulness rhythms. While the body`s temperature is held at a constant level, it varies by about 0.5 deg C from a low at about 05.00 hours to a high at about 18.00 hours. It appears that we tend to go to sleep after our body temperature has began to fall and tend to wake up after it has started to rise. "The length of the geophysical day is 24 hours. Our sleep-wakefulness rhythm (circadian rhythm) has a duration which varies from individual to individual (usually between 25 and 28 hours) but is always longer than 24 hours. And our biological rhythms are adjusted accordingly, day by day," by these internal biological clocks, to the external geophysical day, to the environment. People sleep, on average, between 6.5 and 8.5 hours. The body-temperature clock also controls the appearance of REM sleep. Project index
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