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A good working memory is perhaps the brain's most important system when it comes to learning a new language. But it appears that working memory is first and foremost determined by our genes. Mila Vulchanova, a professor at NTNU's Department of Modern Foreign Languages, led a study of approximately one hundred ten-year-old elementary school students from Norway. Her research suggests that a good working memory is a decisive factor in developing good language skills and competency. Vulchanova states, "Not only is working memory important in learning new words, it is also important in our general language competence, in areas such as grammar skills. Working memory is connected to our ability to gather information and work with it, and to store and manipulate linguistic inputs as well as other inputs in the brain." Vulchanova's results run contrary to some conventional assumptions in both linguistics and cognitive sciences. Quite often it is believed that children acquire languages regardless of their cognitive abilities, such as perception, spatial understanding, and working memory. In other words, children don't need to learn language per se. It just comes on its own. The results from Vulchanova's research contradict this idea. Not only did the researchers find out that there is a close relationship between language competence in the first language and working memory, but that language competence in the mother tongue correlated highly with skills in a foreign language. "We have found evidence that there is a link between language development and the capacity of our working memory, and that there are common cognitive mechanisms that support the ability to learn both your mother tongue and a second language," Vulchanova says. "This is important, because it has been the tradition in linguistics to maintain that learning your native language is qualitatively different from learning a foreign language," she says.

This research article was published to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but this experiment did include linguistics. The experiments purpose was to see if more engaged working memory could quickly determine whether a word was really a word, thus the effect of the working memory on semantic meaning. They found that a high working memory load impaired the prime and task efficiency.

Here are the research take-aways: 1. Repetition of tasks - reading, or saying words over and over - continues to be the best method for transforming short-term memories into long-term ones. To do that, we have to retrain our minds to focus on one task at a time. 2. Don't cram. When you rehearse knowledge and practice it often, it sticks, research has shown. So if you can incorporate what you're trying to remember into daily life, ideally over time, your chances of retaining it drastically improve. Space out repetition over the course of days. 3. Sit down and stay put. Memory and focus go hand-in-hand. Dr. Cowan suggests rearranging our office setup to minimize distractions. Stop engaging in useless tasks like surfing the web and just tackle whatever it is you need to work on. Then watch your focus soar and your memory improve. 4. Incentivize moments and read cues. Use visual or verbal cues for items like keys - to associate places and things. Set reminders.

A post detailing how Music training may help Working memory.

Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, notes that while Google is good at finding information, the brain beats it in two essential ways. 1. Context: Champions of Google underestimate how much the meaning of words and sentences changes with context. With the right knowledge in memory, your brain deftly puts words in context. 2. Speed Quick access is supposed to be a great advantage of using the internet. Students have always been able to look up the quadratic equation rather than memorize it, but opening a new browser tab takes moments, not the minutes required to locate the right page in the right book. Yet "moments" is still much slower than the brain operates. That's why the National Mathematics Advisory Panel listed "quick and effortless recall of facts" as one essential of math education. Speed matters for reading, too. Researchers report that readers need to know at least 95 percent of the words in a text for comfortable absorption. Pausing to find a word definition is disruptive. Good readers have reliable, speedy connections among the brain representations of spelling, sound and meaning. Speed matters because it allows other important work - for example, puzzling out the meaning of phrases - to proceed. Using knowledge in the head is also self-sustaining, whereas using knowledge from the internet is not. Every time you retrieve information from memory, it becomes a bit easier to find it the next time.

although a work in progress, it's useful for its annotated bibliography

Prof. Bennett Schwartz: "In a tip-of-the-tongue state a part of our cognitive system called metacognition lets us know that even though we can't retrieve something at the moment it's probably there stored on our memory, and if we work at it we'll get it... the conventional idea is sort of like your brain's, like, a big complicated filing cabinet. This is telling us that that's not so true. You can't just go to the J file and find John there."

Northwestern University researchers, led by Dr Nina Kraus, found that poor readers had reduced neural response (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds compared to good readers. In fact the level of neural enhancement to acoustic regularities correlated with reading ability as well as musical aptitude. The musical ability test, specifically the rhythm aspect, was also related to reading ability. Similarly a good score on the auditory working memory related to better reading and to the rhythm aspect of musical ability. Dr Kraus explained, "Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem. Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children. These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training."

Research shows that under some conditions, music actually improves our performance, while in other situations music makes it worse - sometimes dangerously so. Absorbing and remembering new information is best done with the music off, suggests a 2010 study published in Applied Cognitive Psychology. Nick Perham, the British researcher who conducted the study, notes that playing music you like can lift your mood and increase your arousal - if you listen to it before getting down to work. But it serves as a distraction from cognitively demanding tasks. Music might enhance performance if a well-practiced expert, e.g. a surgeon, needs to achieve the relaxed focus necessary to execute a job he's done many times before, but not all physicians in the operating room agree re: the benefits of music. A study of anaesthetists suggested that many felt that music distracted them from carrying out their expected tasks. Another study found that singing or listening to music while operating a simulated car increased drivers' mental workload and slowed responses to potential hazards, leading them to scan their visual field less often and to focus instead on the road right in front of them. Other iPod rules drawn from the research: Classical or instrumental music enhances mental performance more than music with lyrics. Music can make rote or routine tasks (think folding laundry or filing papers) less boring and more enjoyable. Runners who listen to music go faster. But when you need to give learning and remembering your full attention, silence is golden.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

"I described my "Perjury" problem - I was interested in the subject and engrossed in the book for days, but now remember nothing about it - and asked her if reading it had ultimately had any effect on me. "I totally believe that you are a different person for having read that book," Wolf replied. "I say that as a neuroscientist and an old literature major." She went on to describe how reading creates pathways in the brain, strengthening different mental processes. Then she talked about content. "There is a difference," she said, "between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can't retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James's, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren't thinking about it.""

Love it! People keep mentioning "Proust and the Squid" to me, and it's high time I read it.

I think the starting off small (like the questions and fill in the blanks during class) is the best way to find a deep and meaningful topic because it opens your mind to think freely and as you narrow your topic, you'll find a topic that really means something to you. Also, the "Going Beyond Cliché", I think that's going to be hard for me because I'm so used to trying to write the typical 5 paragraph papers that are set up as guidelines during school with topic sentence and 3 supporting details. So, trying to find my own outline might make things a little more difficult for me.

While reading this article, I realized i had already looked past one of the most important factors while choosing my own topic to write about. Before reading the article, I was simply searching for a memory of a time that shaped me into the person I am today, or an instance that would impress a college admissions officer, showing them im the type of student that would fit in perfectly at their school. Then in reading the article, i came across: "What do you think college admissions officers are looking for when they read student essays." Even though this may seem like an obvious task, sometimes, it is easy to get caught up in making yourself look good, and completely forget that you're writing must be interesting enough to stand out to an admissions officer more than others. I don't know if my thought process is easy to understand from an outsider's point of view, but this article showed me that it is important to remember that you're writing to not just impress an audience, but also to show them the real 'you'!

This article is especially helpful because it gives easy to read bullet points to make sure people don't fall into the cliché trap. It's easy to write about something that would be commonly seen in college essays, such as a time someone volunteered at some homeless shelter and they say they're grateful for not being homeless. This article says you should go into more depth other than concluding with a cliché concept.

I think the best piece of advice from this is to show, not tell. I also like the idea of taking a risk, as long as the topic of choice isn't offensive or makes someone feel uncomfortable.

I agree with Kaylin that being yourself is the best way to catch the reader's attention and show your own voice. Colleges don't want to read essays about the generic stories you think they want to hear. Instead they want to read a story coming from memories and thoughts in your head so they can feel as if they know the "real" you instead of the persona put on the paper.

"If we are what we eat, we are also what we write." I liked this article because it was basically saying that you have to display your true self in every way that you can through your writing. Trying to stray from being generic and vague. From this article, I know that what makes a good college essay stand out is to not be afraid to use your sensory but then have reason as to why you're using it and don't just simply "tell", let the reader know exactly what's going on in full specifics as much as possible, use a hook that can work in your favor, and lastly remain original and unique.

Musical training improves the brain's ability to discern the components of sound - the pitch, the timing and the timbre. "To learn to read, you need to have good working memory, the ability to disambiguate speech sounds, make sound-to-meaning connections," said Professor Nina Kraus, director of the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University. "Each one of these things really seems to be strengthened with active engagement in playing a musical instrument."

"Stay Mentally and Socially Active" is an article in the Alzheimer's Association that researches further into the workings of AD and how to mitigate and slow some of the irreversible symptoms that comes with the disease. Through various mental activities and social ones, patients diagnosed with AD can grasp a better understanding of ways to reach out to the community and extend their memories for as long as possible.