In this fast paced world of today where the imagination of the youth is seen as the ideal investment of many a business house to further their ideologies; it is a challenge for them to upgrade their skills to suit the environments of the workplace so that their destinies are as ideal as their parents desire. What make them meet their success are not just the academic skills dished out at their institutions but the deep desire inspired within, commitment towards their aspirations and more importantly their cognitive skills.
What are cognitive skills?
Cognitive skills are mental capacities a student needs to learn academic subjects successfully. A child with better cognitive skills can effectively easily read, think, prioritize, understand, plan, remember, and solve problems. These skills are nothing but effective tools for learning. These skills help the child to process the incoming information, attend and retain thee information, process, analyze, store facts and feelings, create mental pictures, read words and understand concepts.
But what are cognitive skills in real time?
As such the skills cannot be separated into water tight compartments as more than one skill is required to process the information and there is overlapping of skills during a task. But it helps to know them broadly as the differentiation will help in reading the strengths and weaknesses of the child in those particular skills. They can be broadly classified as:
- Attention
- Working memory
- Processing speed
- Long-term memory
- Visual processing
- Auditory processing
- Logic and Reasoning.
Logic and Reasoning skills are the abilities to reason prioritize and plan. If this is not on par the student could find difficulty in problem solving, comprehension and mathematics.
How does the child think and learn?
There is one called as Active thinking for simple analogies and Higher thinking for bringing out the output after some reasoning and logic.
When a question is put to the child as to what is the name of his country, an input is given to the brain in the form of attention and is referred to the Knowledge Bank in the form of working memory. Since the processing does not take much time as the answer in the active memory.
There is another situation wherein a question like the capital of Australia spelled backwards is put to a middle school student; he would hear the question and the input is referred to higher thinking skills and a lot visual processing and auditory processing is done even as logic and reasoning are called into play to visualize the answer and then spell it backwards.
Cognitive Processing – Active and Higher
Successful learning requires coordination and cooperation between Active Processing and Higher Thinking cognitive skills. Here’s how weakness in any of these mental skills might affect the child’s performance:
- If Attention is weak, he may never hear the request.
- If Short-Term Memory is weak the child would forget the request before responding and would want the question to be repeated.
- If Processing Speed is slow the request may have seemed too complex, requiring the need to have it repeated.
- If Logic and Reasoning is weak he may fail to come up with a solution.
- If Auditory Processing is weak he may have been unable to unglue sounds
- If Long-Term Memory is weak he may have been unable to remember letters that represent the sounds.
- If Visual Processing is weak he may have been unable to create a picture of the word in his head.
Homoeopathic Medicine and Cognitive skills:· Homoeopathic Medicine has good remedies which can affect various symptoms in the body that will indirectly have a positive impact on the improvement of cognitive abilities. There are certain remedies like Nux moschata, Opm; etc., which are known to elevate one’s mood, increase alertness, improve concentration etc. For a worked out child, remedies like Alfalfa and Ac. Phos are known to improve healing and rejuvenation. Brahmi, Natrum mur are a couple of remedies that enhance alertness, memory and creativity. Emotional children are soothed to calmness by remedies like Belladonna and Hyoscyamus
