Worried about your memory? Want to improve your grades? Want to help your children learn?

This site offers hundreds of articles and reports on improving your memory, and about how memory works.

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Website 2.0!
Monday, June 7, 2010 - 15:15

Well, here's the new design! A completely different way of doing things than my old site - I'm using a content management system, which has been desperately needed for a long time. Unfortunately, it's been quite a learning curve getting up to speed with it all, and I've still got a ways to go. I...

Latest News

Light shed on the cause of the most common learning disability
Neurofibromatosis type 1 (NF1) is the most common cause of learning disabilities, caused by a mutation in a gene that makes a protein called neurofibromin. Mouse research has now revealed that these...
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - 09:19
Healthy diet could slow or reverse early effects of Alzheimer's disease
Following on from previous research with mice that demonstrated that a diet rich in methionine
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - 09:21
Obesity and body shape linked to poorer brain function in older women
A very large study of older women has found that although there was a small downward trend in cognitive function (as measured by the MMSE) with increasing obesity, this trend was almost entirely...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 21:06
Music aids Alzheimer's patients in remembering new information
The study involved 13 patients and 14 controls, who listened to either spoken lyrics or lyrics sung with full musical accompaniment while reading the printed lyrics on a screen. The 40 lyrics were...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 17:56
Special care plan does not slow decline in patients with Alzheimer's
A study involving over 1100 patients with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease at 50 French clinics has revealed that receiving a comprehensive care plan involving regular 6-monthly assessments (with...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 17:00
Muted emotions misleading in Alzheimer's disease
A small study suggests that the apathy shown by many Alzheimer's patients may not simply be due to memory or language problems, but to a decreased ability to experience emotions. The seven patients...
Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - 12:02
Depression increases risk of dementia
Data from the long-running Framingham Heart Study has revealed that depression significantly increased the risk of developing dementia. Of the 125 people (13%) who were classified as having...
Monday, August 30, 2010 - 17:17
Why it’s better to mix up your practice
A new study explains why variable practice improves your memory of most skills better than practice focused on a single task. The study compared skill learning between those asked to practice one...
Saturday, August 28, 2010 - 15:56
Verbal, not visual, cues enhance visual detection
I’ve talked about the importance of labels for memory, so I was interested to see that a recent series of experiments has found that hearing the name of an object improved people’s...
Friday, August 27, 2010 - 15:48
New technology can help assess autistic & language disorders
A new automated vocal analysis technology can discriminate pre-verbal vocalizations of very young children with autism with 86% accuracy. The LENA™ (Language Environment Analysis) system also...
Thursday, August 26, 2010 - 16:20
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Articles

Approaches to learning another language
How many words do you need to learn?
Acquiring expertise through deliberate practice
K. Anders Ericsson, the guru of research into expertise, makes a very convincing case for the absolutely critical importance of what he terms “deliberate practice”, and the...
Homework: is it worth it?
The Suggested Benefits of Homework The most obvious presumed benefit of homework is, of course, that it will improve students' understanding and retention of the material covered....
Memory FAQs
Is there such a thing as a photographic memory? Will memorizing lists and speeches improve my memory? I've read that people only use 10% of their brain. Is this true? I seem to have more...
Novices' problems with scientific text
This is the last part in my series on understanding scientific text. In this part, as promised, I am going to talk about the difficulties novices have with scientific texts; what...
The Mozart Effect
The more hyped and less plausible passive Mozart Effect
The role of emotion in memory
Does emotion help us remember? That's not an easy question to answer, which is unsurprising when you consider the complexities of emotion. First of all, there are two, quite different,...
Action Slips
There is a very common form of forgetfulness that is not really a failure of memory. When we get in our car to drive to place A and find ourselves instead on the road to the more...
Mental stimulation
The evidence that diet, physical exercise, and mental stimulation all help prevent age-related cognitive decline and reduce the risk of mild cognitive impairment and Alzheimer’s, is now...
Biological clocks and memory
I’ve always been interested in the body’s clocks — and one of the most interesting things is that it is clocks, in the plural. It appears the main clock is located in a part of the...
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