Moreover, by age ten many children were using two or more memory strategies to help them recall information. Schneider, Kron-Sperl, andВ HГјnnerkopfВ (2009) reported a steady increase in the use of memory strategies from ages six to ten in their longitudinal study (see Table 5.2). Examples of memory strategies include rehearsing information you wish to recall, visualizing and organizing information, creating rhymes, such вЂњiвЂќ before вЂњeвЂќ except after вЂњcвЂќ, or inventing acronyms, such as вЂњroygbivвЂќ to remember the colors of the rainbow. Such strategies are often lacking in younger children but increase in frequency as children progress through elementary school. This article was originally published with the title 'What Causes The Brain To Have Slow Processing Speed, And How Can The Rate Be Improved?' in SA Mind 25, 2, 70 (March 2014)Дoi:10.Memory Strategies: Bjorklund (2005) describes a developmental progression in the acquisition and use of memory strategies. A person may sustain or even improve information processing speed by paying close attention to vascular risk factors, engaging in regular aerobic exercise, eating well and continuing to challenge oneself intellectually.

More important, slowed information processing affects almost every aging adult to some degree, and the line between normal and abnormal is fuzzy. These are a few of the many ideas out there-other factors surely remain to be discovered. Head trauma, including concussions, may play a role. In other individuals, slowed processing speed could be the first sign of a neurodegenerative illness, such as Alzheimer's disease. Some people may have a genetic predisposition to age-related white matter decay, a poorly understood but actively studied hypothesis. In some people, diabetes, smoking, high blood pressure or other so-called vascular risk factors can wear away at the blood vessels feeding the brain's white matter, starving axons of much needed oxygen and glucose. But what causes this axonal communication to slow down in the first place? Slowed information transfer along axons may impede processing speed. Some compelling evidence suggests that such a decline reflects wear and tear of the white matter in the brain, which is made up of all the wires, or axons, that connect one part of the brain to another. Yet the reasons for this age-related deceleration in information processing are not completely understood and may vary from person to person.

Many elderly individuals have noticed that it takes them longer to solve problems or make decisions than it did when they were young. That processing speed slows with age is intuitive to most people. Studies suggest that the speed of information processing changes with age along an inverted U-shaped curve, such that our thinking speeds up from childhood to adolescence, maintains a period of relative stability leading up to middle age, and finally, in late middle age and onward, declines slowly but steadily. To a brain scientist, processing speed means just that: the rate at which a human can take in a bit of new information, reach some judgment on it and then formulate a response. Kerchner, assistant professor of neurology and neurological sciences at the Stanford University School of Medicine, responds: What Causes the Brain to Have Slow Processing Speed, and How Can the Rate Be Improved?-Heather Walker, via email

Cognitive speediness definition