Guest Post by Robert Blakey:
Take a sugar capsule which is labelled and marketed as a proven treatment and you may recover from an illness – that’s the traditional placebo effect. Take on the belief that a test’s answers are being displayed subliminally and your test score may improve – that’s the new drug-free placebo effect demonstrated by Ulrich Weger and Stephen Loughnan in a paper published this March. (more…)
Check out this screenshot of the App Store last night. Not only is Brainscape’s Learn Spanish App the #1 free educational app in the App Store– 5 of our other apps rose to the Top 10, making up the majority of the top free educational apps. Couldn’t be prouder!
Here at Brainscape HQ, we’ve been working really hard: improving the app, releasing new subjects, and changing our look. We’re glad to know that hard work pays off and just wanted to share.
Hopefully this is the path we’ll be on for the foreseeable future. We still have high hopes for the main Brainscape App (and you should all go download it and sync to your Brainscape accounts!) and will continue to work even harder to make Brainscape the best learning platform in the world.
Thank YOU for helping make us a success.
You may think your planned-down-to-the-second study schedule and a 4-pack of energy drink are all you need to ace your finals, but have you considered how you can optimize your body just as well? In fact, if you’re not preparing your body for final exams, your brain isn’t going to perform as well as it should!
To get your body and mind on the right path to optimized final exam performance, here are three things you can start doing NOW: (more…)
The nearer a deadline looms or the closer we get to the date of an important exam (finals week, anyone?), the higher our stress levels rise. Instead of channeling this stress into any kind of productivity, we often only stress more by worrying about possible failure. Not what we need.
There are many tips and tricks out there to help you increase your productivity, learn more efficiently and manage your time. Some can prove successful once you find out what suits your needs and your situation. However, no method will ever help in the long run if you are stressed out while working.
Step 1 towards creating an ideal environment for effective learning should therefore always be detecting and eliminating stress factors. (more…)
SPRING IS HERE! At Brainscape we’re celebrating the Spring Equinox with an update to the Brainscape App and NEW Brainscape subjects. We’ve also updated some of our existing subjects, so take a look below to see what we’ve just released and what’s about to hit the shelves… (more…)
Sleep and dreaming are two topics we love to discuss on the Brainscape blog. We know that sleep is important for consolidating learning, and, in particular, dreaming’s role in learning in memory is huge. I also know that a great dream is sometimes the most fun I can have all day. So, why not learn how to control our dreams? This phenomenon is known as lucid dreaming, and we’d love to learn how to do it.
Some folks put together a little infographic with tips for learning how to control your dreams. (more…)
Guest Post by Aaron Knight:It’s pretty easy to get started learning a new language. Becoming truly fluent, though, is difficult. I’m often asked for advice by English learners who have been studying the language for years but haven’t improved as much as they would have liked. This is the advice I give them:
Guest Post from Sam Seidenberg:
Have your finals week dreams of being caught pantless in the classroom of the one exam you forgot to study for have finally been replaced by dreams of reindeer-meat latkes sizzling in the kitchen and sugar plum rabbis doing the hora around a dreidel-adorned Christmas tree?
Then it would seem that winter break has arrived.
Guest post from LearnStuff.com:
If you think working overtime, skipping your lunch hour and staying chained to your desk will make you more productive, you need to cut yourself some slack and take a break.
Working non-stop without taking a break can increase your chances of weight gain, heart disease and worse. Staring at a computer screen for more than 2 hours per day can cause Computer Vision Syndrome, a real affliction, which causes blurry vision, headaches, dry eyes and can lead to long-term nearsightedness. However, getting up and away from your desk for just 5 minutes can alleviate eye strain and reduce fatigue in addition to making you feel better. The mere act of standing at your desk instead of sitting at it can help you burn up to 2500 calories per week. Not bad for just standing around.
Work hard and break hard; doing so will make you a healthier, happier and more productive employee. (more…)
As you have been hearing in the news, Hurricane Sandy ripped through New York, New Jersey and the East Coast nearly three weeks ago. She left millions without power or heat for days, and thousands more are still without power, heat or even homes. If you can help out, here is a good resource to help you get started.
Thankfully, the Brainscape team was unharmed, and we’ve been back in our office the past two weeks. Those of us who lost power had it restored a week later, and none of us suffered major damages. The one thing about Sandy that affected the team most was the lack of transportation, leaving us working virtually for an entire week.
Luckily, the Monday morning before the hurricane hit, we were still able to squeeze in our weekly meeting…even without being able to take the subway to work. Thank you Google Hangouts for saving our meeting! Take a look at the NINE of us hanging in our Google Hangout right before we lost power. (more…)
