Group items tagged

Background: Memory is an essential part of our lifestyles that is vaguely understood. Memory is our brain's ability to encode, store, retain, organize, alter, and recover information and past experiences (Klatzky, 1975). It is often divided into three stages known as sensory memory, short-term memory, and long-term memory (Atkinson and Shiffrin, 1971).

Mental agility can be boosted by even a short period of learning a language, a study suggests. Tests carried out on students of all ages suggest that acquiring a new language improves a person's attention, after only a week of study. Researchers also found that these benefits could be maintained with regular practice.

"All of the justices talk about "legalese" in disparaging terms, and many refer to great fiction writers as masters of language. ... That sentiment is echoed by Breyer, who points to Proust, Stendhal and Montesquieu as his inspirations. Justice Anthony Kennedy loves Hemingway, Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, Dickens and Trollope. ..."

I thought this article was great because it added onto the other previous articles posted onto Diigo. It gave me even more tips on how to write my College Essay. 1. Write as you speak. 2. Be original. 3. Show genuine enthusiasm. 4. Create some mystery. 5. Focus. 6. Use active verbs. 7. Use short sentences and simple words.

Reinforcing good behavior while discouraging disobedience and anti-social behavior generally produces positive results in children. Positive reinforcement helps children feel good about their choices, which motivates them to increase the behaviors that bring rewards. Praise and positive reinforcement usually produces both short-term and long-term positive results. This article talks about how positive reinforcement and encouragement from a young age affects the development of the character of a child.

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.

This article explains a little bit about a study done testing how well people could learn Hungarian words in two different ways: listen to spoken words and repeat them back or listen to words said rhythmically or sung. The study found that those who listened to the rhythmically or sung words were better at remembering the vocabulary both short term and long term. This shows that perhaps music can help students trigger memory recall.

The brains of adolescents are notoriously more receptive to short-term rewards and peer approval, which can lead to risky behavior. But researchers and educators are noticing that young people are also more sensitive to notions of social justice and autonomy. Teenage rebellion can be virtuous - even wholesome - depending on the situation. A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds that teenagers make wiser choices if they are encouraged to reimagine healthy behavior as an act of defiance.

The amygdala is an almond shaped mass of nuclei located deep within the temporal lobe of the brain. It is a limbic system structure that is involved in many of our emotions and motivations, particularly those that are related to survival. The amygdala is involved in the processing of emotions such as fear, anger and pleasure. > Additional link provided to other neurological terms such as the hippocampus.

Amusia is a deficit in musical memory, recognition, and in pitch processing that people can be born with or acquire through brain damage. Some people may think of themselves as being "tone-deaf", but most of these "bad" singers are just that. People with amusia are so unable to hear tones that they even struggle to differentiate between questions and statements when spoken. Language, like music, uses sound to convey meaning; be it a story, or simply an emotion. In fact, music and spoken language use many of the same structural elements: pitch, duration, intensity and melodic contour, to name a few. Melodic contour is the pattern in which pitch changes from high to low over time. This contouring of pitch is often used to express emotion in music. The emotional effect of contouring is appreciated across many cultures and across many age groups. In speech, melodic contour is created by intonation, which allows us to place emphasis upon certain words and distinguish the purpose of the sentence; e.g. whether it is a question, statement or command. These comparisons provide evidence for the overlap of brain areas and mechanisms that underlie speech and music processing. In addition, the storing of sound patterns in short-term memory is also overlapping for both language and music.

Dr. Nick Perham, a lecturer in the School of Health Sciences at the University of Wales Institute, Cardiff, conducted a 2010 study, "Can preference for background music mediate the irrelevant sound effect?", that shows how music can interfere with short-term memory performance. Perham had subjects conduct a certain task, in this case recalling a series of numbers, while listening to different kinds of background music. If sound exhibits acoustical variations, or what Perham calls an "acute changing-state," performance is impaired. Steady-state sounds with little acoustical variation don't impair performance nearly as much. Perham asked his subjects how they thought they performed when exposed to different tastes in music. Each reported performing much worse when listening to disliked music, although the study's results showed no difference. However, Perham found no distinction in performance, regardless of whether the music was liked or disliked: both were "worse than the quiet control condition. Both impaired performance on serial-recall tasks." The interviewer queried how curious how prevalent serial-recall is in everyday life, and if one could get by without developing this skill. Unlikely, Perham says, as one would have tremendous difficulty recalling phone numbers, doing mental arithmetic, and even learning languages. "Requiring the learning of ordered information has also been found to underpin language learning. If you consider language, learning syntax of language, learning the rules that govern how we put a sentence together, all of these require order information . . . " Perham says.