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When considering what will be the most effective strategies for you, don't forget the basic principles of memory: (1) Repetition repetition repetition The trick is to find a way of repeating that is interesting to you. This is partly governed by level of difficulty (too easy is... |
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I recently reported on a study showing how the gestures people made in describing how they solved a problem (the Tower of Hanoi) changed the way they remembered the game. These findings add to other research demonstrating that gestures make thought concrete and can help us understand and... |
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Research with children has demonstrated that the ability to learn new words is greatly affected by working memory span - specifically, by how much information they can hold in that part of working memory called "phonological short-term memory". The constraining effect of working memory capacity... |
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Humans are the animals that manipulate their cognitive environment. I reported recently on an intriguing study involving an African people, the Himba. The study found that the Himba, while displaying an admirable amount of focus (in a visual perception task) if they were living a... |
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Learning a new language is made considerably more difficult if that language is written in an unfamiliar script. For some, indeed, that proves too massive a hurdle, and they give up the attempt. Scripts, like languages, also vary considerably in difficulty. There are two main reasons for... |
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Find out about the pegword mnemonic Here are pegwords I've thought up in the Spanish language. As with the original example, let's try it out with our cranial nerves. En español, los nervios craneales son:
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A New Yorker cartoon has a man telling his glum wife, “Of course I care about how you imagined I thought you perceived I wanted you to feel.” There are a number of reasons you might find that funny, but the point here is that it is very difficult to follow all the layers. This is a sentence in... |
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In 2002, a British study scanned the brains of ten "superior memorizers" — eight leading contenders in the World Memory Championships, and two individuals previously studied for their extraordinary memory accomplishments — all people that had demonstrated truly impressive feats of memory, in... |
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As I said in my discussion of different scripts, Russian uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Here it is (the 3rd column shows the English counterpart): А а a Б б b В в v ... |
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Find out about the pegword mnemonic To celebrate Māori Language Week here in Aotearoa (New Zealand), I've put together a pegword set in te reo:
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