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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."

This article talks about how poems, acronyms, rhymes, and acrostic helps us to remember things.

From drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans, the folk poetry called landay reflects Afghan life. Landay are two-line, 22-syllable poems in the oral tradition. The form is thousands of years old, thought to come from the caravan trains that arrived in the region in approximately 2,500 BC. Contemporary Afghan women are composing landay as a form of rebellion. Reporter Eliza Griswold studied these contemporary poems and discovered a complex world of rage, empowerment, sorrow and sex.

A mathematician friend shared this article with me. A reading protocol is a set of strategies that a reader must use in order to benefit fully from reading the text. Mathematics has a reading protocol all its own, and just as we learn to read literature, we should learn to read mathematics. Students need to learn how to read mathematics, in the same way they learn how to read a novel or a poem, listen to music, or view a painting.

""When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds," says James Pennebaker. ... If the essay question was asked in a dry, confusing way, the students answered accordingly. If asked in a flighty, "Valley girl" way, the students punctuated their answers with "like," "sorta" and "kinda."... "Style words in the spouses' poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship's end," Ireland says." Unfortunately, the paper isn't online, but you can see the abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20804263

Thanks, Ryan. I think there will be a lot of interest in this research.

The Charles Lutwidge Dodgson poem which gave the English language such portmanteau words as "chortle" and "burble" has also been put into other languages -- including Klingon and Esperanto (four versions). One also in Choctaw. How *does* one translate meaningless words?

thanks for joining us, Mr. Wagenseller!

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut once opined, "There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can't be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes." Thanks to new text-mining techniques, this has now been done. Researchers at the University of Vermont's Computational Story Lab have analysed over 1,700 English novels to reveal six basic story types - you could call them archetypes - that form the building blocks for more complex stories. They are: 1. Rags to riches - a steady rise from bad to good fortune 2. Riches to rags - a fall from good to bad, a tragedy 3. Icarus - a rise then a fall in fortune 4. Oedipus - a fall, a rise then a fall again 5. Cinderella - rise, fall, rise 6. Man in a hole - fall, rise The researchers used sentiment analysis to get the data - a statistical technique often used by marketeers to analyse social media posts in which each word is allocated a particular 'sentiment score', based on crowdsourced data. Depending on the lexicon chosen, a word can be categorised as positive (happy) or negative (sad), or it can be associated with one or more of eight more subtle emotions, including fear, joy, surprise and anticipation. For example, the word 'happy' is positive, and associated with joy, trust and anticipation. The word 'abolish' is negative and associated with anger. Do sentiment analysis on all the words in a novel, poem or play and plot the results against time, and it's possible to see how the mood changes over the course of the text, revealing a kind of emotional narrative. While not a perfect tool - it looks at words in isolation, ignoring context - it can be surprisingly insightful when applied to larger chunks of text

Working on the metaphor poems lead me to wonder why metaphors are so important to communication and emotional connection. This article explains why metaphors have a different affect than other types of communication.