At NTS Drug Rehab we try and mix styles of learning. Also, in our college program, the NTS Academy, we teach students how multimedia learning can be beneficial. There are many benefits of learning through multimedia presentations. Researchers have found that multimedia teaching is much more beneficial to students than the old "lecture only" style of teaching. Almost every professor in college these days incorporates some form of multimedia in their lectures. The best of these professors knows the parameters of multimedia presentations and learning. There are rules to how best to present information in a multimedia fashion that best contributes to learning. Here is what researchers have found works best in multimedia learning.

Principles of Multimedia Learning (Mayer, 2001)
Modality Principle: When learning with multimedia, the brain must simultaneously encode two different types of information, an auditory stimulus (phonological loop) and a visual stimulus (visual spatial sketchpad). The dual coding of information reduces working memory load and thus aids in the learning of material.

Spatial Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented near rather than far from each other on the page or screen.

Temporal Contiguity Principle: Students learn better when corresponding words and pictures are presented simultaneously (same time) rather than successively.

Coherence Principle: Students learn better when extraneous (tangential) material is excluded rather than included

Individual Differences Principle: Instructional Design effects are stronger for low-knowledge learners than for high knowledge learners, and for high-spatial learners rather than for low-spatial learners.

Labels: College Combined with Addiction Treatment, College Study Skills Combined With Drug and Alcohol Treatment, Memory and Addiction Treatment, Multimedia Learning and Drug Rehab

There are schemas and scripts when it comes to memory. A schema is an organized, structured set of information about a concept, theme, or person. Schemas involve categorization of any type of information in the world (ex: hospital, patients, nurses, etc.). Scripts are schemas for an event in the world. For example a restaurant script involves everything you do when you go to eat at a restaurant (e.g., sitting down, ordering drinks, ordering food, paying the bill, etc.). Within Scripts there are inferences which involves Top Down Processing and allows people to fill in the gaps where there might be blank spots. This often happens when people black out from drinking alcohol. In addiction treatment, and in therapy in addiction treatment, sometimes addicts and alcoholics struggle to reconstruct their memories. Often times addicts and alcoholics will fill in gaps in their schemas with inferences. The problem is that this often results in false memories. In the extreme cases of inferences, people can create their own false memories of abuse that did not occur.

Elizabeth Lofus at the University of California Irvine is one of the top researchers in false memories and eyewitness testimony.
Recently a 60 Minutes story talked about the prevalence of false memory and how false memory eyewitness testimony has resulted in many eyewitnesses falsely incriminating innocent people. According to research there are several factors involved in the overconfidence of eyewitness testimony.
1. The more you know the more you think you know. The more an eyewitness is exposed to information from an event, the more they think they know what happened.
2. Post-identification reinforcement happens when other people tell you you are right. For instance a therapist who likes to validate everything their client's say might reinforce a false memory.
3. Repeated questioning of the eyewitness reinforces their story. Simply put, when you are forced to relive a shaky memory over and over again, your confidence in the false memory gains strength. This can happen with drug addicts and alcoholics who deny the amount of drugs and alcohol they have used and do it over and over again, till they believe their own false memories about how bad it actually was for them. They may minimize their stories to the point where the truth of those memories fades into the background.
The new research in false memories is key to addiction treatment, because people's memories when they get in to treatment are often shaky at best. Every clinician who works with a client must be vigilant at validating their client's stories with secondary sources and be slow to reinforce denial and minimization.
Brendan Bickley, Clinical Director, NTS

Labels: Drug and the Brain, Extended Care Treatment, False Memory, Memory and Addiction Treatment

Many people who enter drug and alcohol treatment think they have neurological problems either as a result of their addiction or alcoholism, or because they think they were born with some neurological defect, but many times people are simply uneducated as to how the brain works and how memory works. Sometimes just educating someone on how the brain works in addiction treatment will help ease their fears about their own memory. In the NTS Academy, we help our college students in addiction treatment learn how the brain works when it comes to memory. This helps our NTS Academy college students devise ways to remember information they are learning in college.

So how does memory work?

Short-Term memory can only store 7 +/- pieces of information. That is the reason why phone numbers are only 7 numbers long and license plates are only allowed the number of letters and numbers they are allowed. It's been hypothesized that anyone who can store more information than that is either an insane genius or some type of autistic savant. The short term memory will automatically remove information when it reaches its limit to make room for new information. So, for instance, if you have a lot of things to do in a day, you don't have a day planner to keep track and remind you of what you have to do, and those things you have to do exceeds 7, then you will inevitably forget to do something you were supposed to do.

The short-term memory of individuals sends information to be encoded to the long-term memory. This process is called Encoding and is the process of initially storing information in Short-term working memory and eventually sending it to Long-term memory (Labeling Memories). Retrieval is the process of identifying information from long-term memory and the information being sent to short-term working memory for correct processing of information.

There are two types of retrieval- Recall and Recognition. Recall is the ability to consciously retrieve and reproduce information that was previously encountered. When our NTS Academy students have to write an essay for an exam, they must use this type or retrieval process. This type of retrieval process is more difficult than the recognition retrieval process. Recognition retrieval is the ability of a person to identify information that was previously encountered and involves partial information. This type of retrieval is used during multiple choice exams. So, when our NTS Academy students in our addiction treatment facility have the notion that multiple choice exams are easier than essay questions they are technically correct, but the problem is that people tend to study less for multiple choice exams, which ultimately leads to them doing more poorly on the exam than if they had studied for the exam as if they were taking an essay exam. In the NTS Academy we help students learn how to perfect their study skills and master the essay and multiple choice tests.

Labels: College Combined with Addiction Treatment, Memory and Addiction Treatment, Study Skills