Mems, as explained by William James
Memrise enthusiast and French child-psychologist Juliette Danjon brought this marvellous quote by William James to our attention today: “The art of remembering is the art of thinking; … when we wish to fix a new thing in either our own mind or a pupil’s, our conscious effort should not be so much to impress and...
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...
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...
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....
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.
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,...
