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"When a surgeon cut into Henry Molaison's skull to treat him for epilepsy, he inadvertently created the most important brain-research subject of our time - a man who could no longer remember, who taught us everything we know about memory. Six decades later, another daring researcher is cutting into Henry's brain. Another revolution in brain science is about to begin."

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."

"The current, long-standing theory suggests that children learn their first words through a series of associations; they associate words they hear with multiple possible referents in their immediate environment....A small set of psychologists and linguists, including members of the Penn team, have long argued that the sheer number of statistical comparisons necessary to learn words this way is simply beyond the capabilities of human memory.... rich interactions with children-and patience-are more important than abstract picture books and drilling."

"...when the exact same material is presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student performance. ... However, there are some subtle distinctions that favor print, which may matter in the long run. ... First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information. "Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. ... seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page - or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic - can help cement material in mind. ... spatial context may be particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to easily recall location cues so we can find our way around ... E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print."

Many people have a hard time committing things to memory, especially with all the distractions that can come your way. Maybe the answer is as close as your iPod! Developing better memorization and faster recall skill for school-related projects will enhance your ability to pull together a wider spectrum of information for class discussions, papers, and tests.

Music can have an impressive array of affects on our brains, influencing anything from memory to emotion. (Ear worms make an appearance in this article)

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.

this article talks about how the color of text affects your memory of the words/ comprehension.

This source explains how language learning is involved in very basic learning systems that lots of animals have. Language learning falls into either declarative memory (memorize it once) or procedural memory (repeat it over and over until you get it). The research shows that you learn language in one of these two ways. The way that you end up learning in depends on when and how you learn the language.

Word "edges" are important for language acquisition. Children start to learn the sound of words by remembering the first and last syllables. A new study sheds light on the information the infant brain uses during language acquisition and the format in which it stores words in its memory. Infants start to learn words very early, during the first months of life, and to do so they have to memorise their sounds and associate them with meanings. The study by Silvia Benavides-Varela (now at the IRCCS Fondazione Ospedale San Camillo in Venice, but at SISSA at the time the study was performed) and Jacques Mehler, neuroscientist at SISSA, revealed the format in which infants remember their first words. In particular, the two scientists saw that infants aged about seven months accurately encode the sound and position of the first and last syllable, whereas they have difficulty retaining the order of syllables in the middle.

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.

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."

The author, a specialist and researcher in linguistics and discourse analysis, was interested in communication between individuals from different cultures. The misunderstandings it provokes are often based on unconscious reflexes and reference points which makes them all the more damaging. Communication between humans would be very difficult, if not impossible, without discursive memory. Our memories allow us to understand each other. Gregory Charles says in a tweet after the attack at the Grand Mosque in 2017, "Every nasty word we utter joins sentences, then paragraphs, pages and manifestos and ends up killing the world." This idea is defined by specialists in discourse analysis by theconcent of interdiscoursement. Not being aware of this discursive mechanism can cause many misunderstandings. Understanding it certainly helps to communicate better. Putting yourself in your audience's place is the key to good communication.

This article shows new evidence which suggests that language is learned in circuits that are used for many other purposes, instead of the common claim that language acquisition occurs in a specific part of the brain dedicated to the purpose. How good we are at remembering vocabulary relates to how good we are at declarative memory, which is used to remember shopping lists or people's faces. Grammar in children, on the other hand, correlates most strongly to procedural memory which is used for driving or playing an instrument.

As well as making signage clearer, it's been shown that an easy-to-read typeface might convince your brain that a given task is easier to perform because information printed in a legible typeface ostensibly requires less mental effort to understand and process. Interestingly, some studies suggest when words are harder to process, people pay more attention to what the words actually say; because of that, the memory trace becomes stronger, aiding comprehension and retention. Printing something in hard-to-read font increases "desirable difficulty," the addition of an obstruction to the learning process that requires you to put in just enough effort, which leads to better memory retention and deeper cognitive processing." For those of you who might be interested in testing desirable difficulty out, the author suggests an experimental design.

This was an interesting article I used for my Smorgasboard project. I wanted to study how dementia affects our ability to speak and understand language. This article covered different types of aphasia, or loss of language that occur when one has either Alzheimer's or other types of dementia.