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Information about even the tiniest details of our daily lives zooms along neurons in our brains and is processed and saved in some predetermined location. How and what information is stored in the memory is in part dependent on whether an individual is a man or a woman.

Article about some of the remarkable effects that music has on learning, memory, coordination, learning, and on the body itself.

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.

Study shows that children taught words then tested on the next day score better than those tested the same day Nothing beats a good night's sleep for helping youngsters learn new words, new research has revealed. A study suggests that even the brightest children remember words best when they're given a chance to sleep on it.

A post detailing how Music training may help Working memory.

While this article is directed towards teachers, students can leverage this information to their advantage. Employ the following five strategies to aid retention: 1. Teach a friend. When students explain what they've learned to peers, fading memories are reactivated, strengthened, and consolidated. This strategy not only increases retention but also encourages active learning (Sekeres et al., 2016). 2. The spacing effect: Instead of covering a topic and then moving on, revisit key ideas throughout the school year. Research shows that students perform better academically when given multiple opportunities to review learned material. For example, teachers can quickly incorporate a brief review of what was covered several weeks earlier into ongoing lessons, or use homework to re-expose students to previous concepts (Carpenter et al., 2012; Kang, 2016). 3. Frequent practice tests: Akin to regularly reviewing material, giving frequent practice tests can boost long-term retention and, as a bonus, help protect against stress, which often impairs memory performance. Breaking down one large high-stakes test into smaller tests over several months is an effective approach (Adesope, Trevisan, & Sundararajan, 2017; Butler, 2010; Karpicke, 2016). 4. Interleave concepts: Instead of grouping similar problems together, mix them up. Solving problems involves identifying the correct strategy to use and then executing the strategy. When similar problems are grouped together, students don't have to think about what strategies to use-they automatically apply the same solution over and over. Interleaving forces students to think on their feet, and encodes learning more deeply (Rohrer, 2012; Rohrer, Dedrick, & Stershic, 2015). 5. Combine text with images: It's often easier to remember information that's been presented in different ways, especially if visual aids can help organize information. For example, pairing a list of countries occupied by German forces during World War II wi

A in depth formal write up of the experiment ran to test the effects of cellphones and data collected.

This site states that color can affect memory, keep us organized, and can help those with learning disabilities as well.

A Liverpool University study found reading poetry lights up both the left part of the brain concerned with language, as well as the right hemisphere, an area that relates to autobiographical memory and emotion. Reading triggers "reappraisal mechanisms" that cause people to reflect on their own experiences in light of what they read. The study might also suggest that word choice and sound are crucial elements in creating beneficial literary experiences: more "challenging" prose and poetry (striking wording/phrasing, complex syntax) sparks far more electrical activity in the brain than more pedestrian translations of those passages.

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

What can you recite by heart? Your times tables? German verb formations? The Lord's Prayer? Novelist Salman Rushdie thinks it should be poetry. Speaking at the Hay Festival, the writer described memorising poems as a "lost art" that "enriches your relationship with language". David Whitley, a lecturer at Cambridge University, Whitely, whose Poetry and Memory project surveyed almost 500 people, says: "Those who memorised poems had a more personal relationship [with the poem] - they loved it for the sound and meaning, but it also connected with their life currents - people they loved, or a time that was important to them. "For people who memorise a poem, it becomes a living thing that they connect with - more so than when it is on a page. Learning by heart is often positioned as the opposite of analysis. But for many people who know a number of poems, their understanding grows over time and changes." Psychotherapist Philippa Perry agrees. She points out that memorising anything, from poems to music, means you always have it with you. She thinks that memorising poems can also be good for the health of our brains. "The way we 'grow' our brains is that we make connections between our brain cells - neural pathways. The more you exercise that network, the more you strengthen it. If you learn things by heart, you get better at it."

"They scanned a total of 79 trainees, just before they started to learn the "All-London" Knowledge [memorizing "25,000 streets and 20,000 landmarks and places of interest"], which can take between two and four years to complete. ... those who had attempted the Knowledge had increased the size of the posterior hippocampus - the rear section of the hippocampus which lies at the front of the brain. ... this advantage appeared to come at a price, as the non-cabbies outperformed them in other memory tasks, such as recalling complex visual information." The full study: http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/4398.full.pdf+html

Wanda Wallace, in a study reported in the November 1994 _Journal of Experimental Psychology_, noted that the melody of a song, in some situations, can facilitate learning and recall. The experiments in this article demonstrate that text is better recalled when it is heard as a song rather than as speech, provided the music repeats so that it is easily learned. Furthermore, the experiments indicate that the melody contributes more than just rhythmic information. Music is a rich structure that chunks words and phrases, identifies line lengths, identifies stress patterns, and adds emphasis as well as focuses listeners on surface characteristics. The musical structure can assist in learning, in retrieving, and if necessary, in reconstructing a text.

New studies have found that brain activity follows a very strict protocol during sleep. The brain is constantly using a lot of energy; during sleep one of the things that energy is being used for is to maintain memories that may need to be called upon again.

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