Sensitization - keep whispering it

You don't have to teach everything.  Sometimes just whispering it is enough.

Yesterday my wife got a 4-page mailer via her employer. It was subtitled "Healthy Employees, Healthy Companies."  The cover story was "Appreciating the Moment: Defining Mindfulness." 

I would have normally tossed this mailer into the recycle bin without another look, but the Mindfulness theme caught my eye, and I ended up reading the entire thing.



By design, or otherwise, the back-page article was "A Guide to Multitasking" - which to me represents the other side of this coin.

We all recognize meditation (of any variety) as a common strategy for practising Mindfulness.  So imagine yourself meditating your way to multitasking.



[Btw, one of the articles was about the Power Nap, something I have come to strongly believe in.]



Just as I was getting out of the car after class last night, I caught this teaser on KUOW. "Multitasking Zen University of Washington professor David Levy wants to know if meditation can make multitasking at work less stressful. So he's conducting an experiment with a Zen teacher, a neuropsychologist and a volunteer group of office workers. [The original interview aired on the 14th, but I believe it is going to repeat today at 2:21pm. ]

See how just one article on Mindfulness sensitized me to two other articles that I would surely have otherwise missed?

As if to underline this, yesterday both NPR and the NY Times carried articles on a report in Science magazine Strengthening Individual Memories by Reactivating Them During Sleep.  One of the authors quoted in the NY times piece - Sounds During Sleep Aid Memory, Study Finds  - speculates this can improve SAT scores, and maybe even help footballers learn the playbook.]

“It’s not really that you reminded them of what they needed to know,” Mr. Stickgold [one of the scientists interviewed for the article] said, “but rather you reminded them of a larger memory that they needed to know. ”


So here's a classroom application.  As a student falls asleep in class, as they all surely will, don't wake them up.  Think of it as a power nap, and just whisper a cue that will help them consolidate whatever they heard before they fell asleep.

 [Note: the new beta editor in blogger is so sloooow.]