When you go grocery shopping, how do you remember what to buy? Write down a list, of course. That slip of paper, or your smartphone, will do the remembering for you (it’s an external memory, as we have noted on this blog before). But what if you lose the paper or your phone’s battery dies? […]
Learning and Memory
You’ve decided to go to a country you’ve never been to for your next vacation and want to learn some basics of the language to prepare for your trip. You order a book of introductory phrases and grammar basics. When it arrives, you eagerly crack it open, ready to dig in. You start reading the […]
If you witness a crime, you may be asked to try to pick the perpetrator out of a police lineup. If you are unfamiliar with this line of research or have never been an eyewitness, your notion of a lineup may have come from movies and tv, and may be something like this: (Warning: watching […]
There are a number of factors that make us fundamentally human. We eat. We sleep. We experience emotions. And unfortunately at some point, we all become sick. Where we tend to diverge is how we process and treat our sicknesses. Some people run immediately to the doctor’s office, or if you are anything like me, […]
“Working memory” is a broad term that describes what we do with information that is consciously accessible. For instance, when students take notes in class, they are hearing the lecturer’s sentences, placing them in the context of what they know about the topic, and synthesizing both to form the note they ultimately write on the […]
What is it we remember, and why? Research in cognitive psychology has provided a broad and often very reliable sketch of the variables that determine memory performance. For example, recall of words is better when word repetitions are spaced rather than massed. To learn the Lithuanian word for cookie, you are better off spreading apart […]
The start of a Formula 1 Grand Prix is always exciting and adrenalin producing, even if you watch it on TV from thousands of miles away and keep the noise level below the pain threshold. (A Formula 1 cockpit is one of the loudest places on Earth.) Have a look at a start of a […]
Memory can be quite fickle. Sometimes we remember the things we desire most to forget and forget the things we diligently seek to remember. This had led to the popularity of such phrases as, I never forget a face (if you are like Willy Wonka) or how could I ever forget (if you are like […]
When a person “doesn’t know right from left”, they are metaphorically confused, or unable to navigate the world. In the non-metaphorical meaning of the phrase, we’re talking about a person whose concepts of right and left are somehow undeveloped – and telling left from right is an ability that we definitely need in order to […]
Have you ever had a conversation with someone, maybe with your spouse, your co-worker, or a student, and based on their response (or lack thereof) you ask yourself, “Did they even hear a word I said?” In the American movie, Rush Hour, the actor Chris Tucker posed the question a different way, “Do you understand […]