Memrise Labs: visualizing your learning
Deep in a windowless basement, we’ve outfitted a scientific SWAT team of robot chimpanzees, naked but for their tiny white lab coats and camelpaks filled with Red Bull. Welcome to the Memrise Labs, where we’re working on a number of experimental projects. Many of these research efforts will take centuries to come to fruition, but...
Ed Cooke on NPR: how to create a memorable meal
In NPR’s To Make A Memorable Meal, Start With A Memory: Sensorium is a unique, 12-course dinner party that’s part circus, part play. It was held in a three-story high geodesic dome in a field near Washington’s Anacostia River this spring. When we first heard about Brown’s project, we knew he had to meet Ed Cooke. Ed...
Why do we forget, and how do we improve our memory?
Sometimes we forget because we didn’t form much of a memory in the first place. For instance, if you think you’re bad at remembering people’s names, it could just be that there’s so much going on at the moment when you first meet them that you simply weren’t paying enough attention when they introduced themselves....
Video from ryanthewired: Using Memrise to learn Japanese
Ryanthewired has uploaded a great video tutorial showing how he uses Memrise to learn Japanese.
Neuroscience and education: how the brain works and why it sometimes doesn’t
Over the coming months, we’ll be publishing a series of short pieces on how the brain works, with news you can use from the world of neuroscience. 3 reasons why learning a language is like teaching two thousand toddlers to ride a bike Do we only use 10% of our brains? How is memory stored...
How are brains different from hard disks?
Memories in the brain are spread over an ensemble of neurons. Like actors in a play, or musicians in an orchestra, each neuron contributes to the whole memory but isn’t essential – you can lose one or two and the memory will be degraded, rather than suddenly wiped out. On the other hand, if you damage...
How is memory stored in the brain?
This is a tough question to answer because our intuitions mislead us. It’s tempting to imagine that we have lots of neurons, and lots of memories, and so perhaps each neuron represents a different memory, a little like the 1s and 0s on a hard disk. But in fact, your brain distributes memories over a...
3 reasons why learning a language is like teaching two thousand toddlers to ride a bike
When I’m thinking about the neuroscience of learning a language, it’s easy to get lost in a sea of p-values and psycholinguistics. But instead, I prefer to picture two thousand toddlers learning to ride a bike. Why ‘two thousand’? Two thousand words in a foreign language is enough for basic fluency. So that’s our goal....
Greg Detre interviewed on the neuroscience of flashcards
Memrise co-founder Greg Detre was interviewed by education blogger Kirsten Winkler on Memrise and the neuroscience of flashcards.
Ed Cooke on The Art of Memory at Princeton
Mr Memory columnist of the London Times, author of Remember, Remember (Penguin, 2008), and Grandmaster of Memory, Ed Cooke is giving a public lecture at Princeton: Wednesday, June 17th at 8:00PM Princeton University, Betts Auditorium Room N-101, Architecture Building. Ed famously trained journalist Josh Foer to become the US Memory Champion in less than a...
The woman who can’t forget, can
Psychologists have come to hold two basic tenets about human memory capacity: Everyone’s innate memory abilities are limited. With the right techniques, anyone can learn to dramatically improve their memory for things that they make an effort to remember. For instance, Maguire et al (2002) scanned the brains of ten world-class mnemonists, and concluded: Using neuropsychological measures,...
