Learn to read a sentence of Chinese in 3 minutes!
汉字好学! Do you have no idea what that means? Well allow me, for a moment to set off on what might appear to be a bit of a tangent and all will soon become clear. I want to talk about the way children learn, and the way that I believe that they *should* learn. Since...
Why childhood memories are dangerous
Childhood memory can be something of a treasure-trove for thinking about the mind. So much deep conceptual change happens in early childhood, and so little in adulthood, that childhood memories can be uniquely helpful in understanding what it is to have a truly different perspective, and so what is going on with the normal perspectives...
Some thoughts on Chinese Tones
The tones in Chinese give rise to a lot of confusion and discussion. I am always trying to come up with different ways to explain them and different ways to think about them to make them stick more easily to English-speaking memories. Having received a recent barrage of questions regarding the tones, it seemed like...
Ed teaching BBC man the periodic table in an afternoon
I’m appearing tonight on BBC1 at 7.30 p.m. in an episode of ”Bang Goes the Theory”, which has devoted tonight’s episode to memory. They wanted me to teach presenter Dallas Campbell the periodic table, so he knew it by heart. I was to have no more than a few hours with him. The periodic table...
The Memory Garden
Learning is one of the great pleasures of life, yet the most common emotion in learning is fear. A common object of that fear is the time and effort it will take to come to know something; relatedly, we sometimes think that to learn a little is not something to be proud of. Fear that...
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....
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...
Are Chinese characters pictographs?
I am currently staying in a small village in Yunnan province inhabited by the Naxi ethnic minority. We are staying in a truly idyllic courtyard house of almost absurd beauty. I’m not sure that this photo gets close to doing it justice, but it may give you a flavour. What you will certainly not be...
How to use your brain like a pro
If someone told you that they could change you from a normal, forgetful person into the US memory champion in just one year, would you believe them? Josh Foer didn’t. Memrise’s co-founder, Grandmaster of Memory Ed Cooke, met Josh at the US memory championships a few years ago. Josh was there as a journalist covering...
What celebrities can teach us about memory
A while ago, a New Zealand judge called Robert Murfitt ruled that a girl who’d been named ‘Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii‘ should be placed in his court’s guardianship until ‘appropriately’ renamed. He felt that the name ‘makes a fool of the girl and sets her up with a clear social disability and handicap’....
Never lose your keys again!
Memory, it’s said, rejoices in the unusual, the delightful and the socially unacceptable. Does the whereabouts of your keys fit any of these descriptions? No? Well there’s your problem for you. Almost everyone finds it difficult to recall where they’ve left their keys. There’s no doubt that it’s just much more difficult than recalling where,...
