During this week I have gotten introduced to this game called flow. The object of the game is to fill an entire board with pipe to solve the puzzle. You do so by connecting matching colors. If you try to overlap pipe it will break the connection that already exist. It sounds really easy and while some boards do present themselves as fairly easy some boards are also really hard to solve. I have found the game to be very addicting and I enjoy trying to solve the puzzles.

While playing this game I am reminded of the chapter on problem solving. While I am not doing something really similar to the acrobat problem or the tower of Hanoi problem this game does require you to use problem solving strategies to complete one board and advance to the next level.

What I enjoy most in playing this game is getting a perfect score on a particular board. Every board has a certain amount of moves it can be completed in at a minimum. However there is no limit on how many moves you can take. I have managed to solve 149/150 of the 296 puzzles with perfect scores so far. Hopefully by the end of the holiday I will have completed the 900 I have access to.

Something that has always bothered me is my ability to remember some things and not others. The biggest issue I have is that I can remember the lyrics to every song in my iTunes account but fail to remember any of the material I learn in school long enough to pass a test.

I have always received As and Bs and since elementary school I have received post secondary school marks on standardized testing. However when it comes to taking a test or quiz I have not been able to pass. The only exception to this is math. I absolutely love math and actually have the opposite problem – I can’t remember a math test or quiz that I didn’t pass. I can study for weeks on end, I can gradually study from the beginning of the semester to the final exam, I can cram, I can fill out study guide after study guide, reread every chapter, take and rewrite notes, make and study flash cards, but NOTHING seems to work. On the other hand if I listen to a song twice I can remember all the lyrics and by the fourth time I hear it, I have all the ad-libs down. I can go years without hearing the song and still if it comes on I can recite (I can’t sing for my life) the words and ad-libs as if it is one of my favorite songs.

We are constantly taking in stimuli and the stimuli that makes it through short term memory, and working memory gets placed into long term memory. Experiences and specific events become a part of our episodic memory. Episodic memory is “the memory of autobiographical events (times, places, associated emotions and other contextual knowledge) than can be explicitly stated” (The Human Memory). From research done it has been proven that we associate song lyrics with our experiences. Therefore the lyrics become apart of our episodic memory and just like we are able to recall past experiences we are able to recall the lyrics to songs, even if we haven’t heard them in a while. Semantic memory is the complete opposite. It is the “record of facts, meanings, concepts and knowledge about the extern world we have acquired” (The Human Memory). This is the memory system that is responsible for the information on my tests and quizzes.

I am just about 20 years old but I am probably one of the hardest working people I know (not to toot my own horn or anything). I refuse to take less than 15 credits a semester no matter how my schedule looks. And I have one extracurricular activity that somehow has 4 or 5 roles that come along with it. In short I am on the go from the time I open my eyes at 6 am until the moment I walk in the house and crash on the couch around 12midnight.

Throughout the day I am getting emails, calls, and messages from people who need my assistance, my input, or in the words of Olivia Pope “handle it”. The only thing is I forget about 60% of the things that I should be doing or people I should be responding to. However I am very organized. I have a dry erase calendar that is propped up in my living room. My phone and laptop also have information for the month imputed and reminders are set and every week I make a to-do list. So how do I forget? Well half of what I need to remember never gets written down. When I go to open up my phone to make a note I end up forgetting why I pulled out my phone in the first place. That leads me to check the emails but as I start to read emails, I get asked to do something so I never respond to the email or write down that I need to go back to it. Of course it eventually hits me at a later time that I need to respond to this email, or call this person back and of course everything gets done.

I noticed that when I lay down I still am thinking about things that need to be done. By this point I have turned off my electronic devices and the lights are off so I don’t plan or writing it down. When I would wake up in the morning I would remember those things throughout the day a lot easier. For example if I said I need to call my doctor and schedule an appointment to check get my eyes checked as I am laying down going to sleep I would be more likely to remember to stop and call the doctor before the day is out, whereas if I thought about it while I was on the go during the day I would be more likely to forget.

As I was reading chapter 1 I was intrigued by the work of Steffan Gais and his coworkers done in 2006. They had high school students learn a list of 24 vocabulary words in English and German. One group studied the words and within 3 hours went to sleep while another group studied the words and stayed up for 10 hours before going sleep. 24-36 hours later both groups were tested and it was shown that those who went to sleep soon after studying got less wrong than those who stayed up for a long period of time after (Goldstein, 2011, p. 16).

National Institutes of Health has also done some research on sleep and memory. So far they have come to the conclusion that “sleep after learning is essential to help save an d cement that new information into the architecture of the brain, meaning that you’re less likely to forget.” Research has also shown that during sleep some memories are strengthened (Sleep On It, 2013).

Can I go to sleep every time I need to remember to do something? No of course not but at least when it comes to tests and quizzes I know that a good night’s sleep soon after studying will probably better my chances of me retaining the information I studied. And that is always helpful and useful information.

Contie, V., Defibaugh, A., Steinberg, D., & Wein, H. (2013, April 1). Sleep On It. Retrieved September 13, 2014, from http://newsinhealth.nih.gov/issue/apr2013/feature2

Goldstein, E. (2011). Introduction to Cognitive Psychology. In Cognitive psychology: Connecting mind, research, and everyday experience (3rd ed.). Belmont: Wadsworth Cengage Learning.