Tag Archives: Dr Andy Johnson

BU Psychology lecturer gives top tips for improving memory

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Psychology lecturer Dr Andy Johnson contributed his top tips for a features in a number of newspapers about ‘turbo-charging’ your memory.

The articles featured 25 ways to improve memory, following comedian Billy Connelly’s confession that he suffers from bouts of memory loss while on stage – sometimes forgetting the punchlines to his jokes.

Andy’s top tips for improving memory, among those from other experts, were featured in the Daily Mirror, the Scottish Daily Record and The Times of India.

His suggestions include associating a memory with an environment, using things like a particular smell or aroma to help trigger the memory.

He added: “More simply, when in an exam, I advise my students to visualise the place in which they were revising as a cue to memory.”

Other advice from Andy included learning things before you go to bed.

“The best way to ‘consolidate a memory’ is to go through the information just before going to sleep,” he explained.

“This is because there are fewer ‘new’ interfering memories so you will remember it better the next day.”

Read the article in full.

Dr Andy Johnson talks chewing gum and concentration on The Today Programme

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Psychology lecturer Dr Andy Johnson spoke on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme about his research into chewing gum and concentration.

Andy was part of a team of researchers who found that chewing gum can help people focus better while doing tasks.

“In this study our participants undertook a very monotonous and repetitive constant vigilance task, where participants were presented with a sequence of digits and they were looking out for a particular signal,” he told presenter James Naughtie.

He added that participants who chewed gum had less of a decrease in performance throughout the task, and reported being significantly more alert.

He said: “So what we suggest is that chewing gum can facilitate vigilance during a monotonous task but that this is only found when performance has dropped to sub-optimal level, so when it starts to fall down that’s when gum has some scope for having a benefit.

“But if we are at our normal operating levels, we are sort of at ceiling effect, so there is nowhere for cognition to go. So only once our performance begins to drop does gum introduce a benefit in performance and vigilance.”

Dr Johnson, who worked on the study with researchers from Cardiff University, explained that chewing increases blood flow to the brain and that increases delivery of glucose and oxygenated blood to the parts of the brain that are doing the task.

He was also interviewed on BBC Radio Solent’s Breakfast Show, local station Wave 105 and BBC Radio Scotland about the research, which appears in the British Journal of Psychology.

You can listen to Dr Andy Johnson on the Today Programme here for the next seven days.