How to learn like a memory champion

(Thinkstock)

Companies are creating learning aids that tap the science of memories, says David Robson. Do they work in the classroom?

For most of his 20s, Ed Cooke had been hovering around the top 10 of the World Memory Championships. His achievements included memorising 2,265 binary digits in 30 minutes and the order of 16 packs of playing cards in just an hour. But at the age of 26, he was getting restless, and wanted to help others to learn like him. “The memory techniques take a certain discipline,” he says. “I wanted a tool that would just allow you to relax into learning.”

The resulting brainchild was Memrise. Launched in 2010, the website and app is now helping more than 1.4 million users to learn foreign languages, history and science with the ease of Cooke’s memory powers. It has been followed by similar apps that also take the pain out of learning – both for individuals, and in schools, with some teachers finding benefits that even Cooke couldn’t have predicted.

“It’s very powerful – it does all the spade work of learning,” says Dominic Traynor, who teaches Spanish at the St Cuthbert with St Matthias Primary School in London, UK. “I would say we’ve covered a year’s worth of work in the first six months.”

As Cooke first set out developing his idea, he turned to his former classmate at Oxford University, Princeton neuroscientist Greg Detre, to help update his tried-and-tested techniques with the latest understanding of memory. Together, they came up with some basic principles that would guide Memrise’s progress over the following years. The first is the idea of “elaborative” learning – in which you try to give extra meaning to a fact to try to get it to stick in the mind. These “mems”, as the team call them, are particularly effective if they tickle the funny bone as well as the synapses – and so for each fact that you want to learn, you are encouraged to find an amusing image or phrase that helps plant the memory in your mind. For example, in one German language course, the word “abend” for evening, is illustrated with a picture of Abraham Lincoln listening to a ghetto blaster, with the caption “Abe ends work in the evening”. It’s silly, but that’s the point – an absurd image is memorable.

To cultivate those memories, the app then sets you a series of carefully timed tests over the days, weeks and months that follow. Numerous experiments over the past few years have shown that the best way to build new neural pathways is to try and recall it afresh, helping subjects remember more than twice as much, over the long term, than just passively reading the material; self-testing also turns out to be more effective than creative techniques like drawing diagrams and mind maps.

Although you can find other apps designed for rote learning and drilling in this way, Memrise makes use of another trick. Detre had found that the most effective time to reactivate a memory is when you feel that it is half-remembered, half-forgotten – when you feel it’s on the “tip of your tongue” but you can’t quite reach it. So the Memrise team have designed an algorithm that predicts the arrival of that agonising state, and then springs a test on you. Since the app constantly tracks your progress, over time it becomes more accurate at predicting your learning curve, helping you surf the waves of your memory to more efficient learning.

Fun learning

All of which may help take the pain out of learning; however, the big challenge was to make it fun too. “We’re always having to compete for your attention when you look at the screen of your phone,” says Ben Whately, Memrise’s chief operating officer. “The experience has to have as much light-hearted interest as something like Pinterest.” But the team have also tried hard to create a community of learners that encourages friendly competition – so users can upload their courses to share with other people looking to learn the same subject, and they can compare their rank on a leader board. “We needed people to be comfortable to share stuff on sites like Facebook in order for it to get up and running on such a big scale,” says Whately.

Unsurprisingly, it was the friendly competition element that captured the attention of Traynor’s primary school pupils learning Spanish. “As soon as they come into the classroom, they want to see where they are on the leader board,” he says. And there are other advantages. Each lesson, Traynor tends to split the class into two – while half are doing the “spade work” on vocabulary learning on the school’s iPads, he can teach the others – before the two halves switch over. By working with these smaller groups, he can then give more individual attention to each child’s understanding of the grammar.

Even more powerfully, Traynor recently began encouraging his class to record and upload their pronunciation of the words onto the app – which they can then share with their classmates using the course. The sound of their classmates seems to have spurred on their enthusiasm, says Traynor. “They’re constantly trying to work out whose voice they’re hearing,” he says. “So they’re giving more attention to the different sounds. I think it’s improved their speaking and listening dramatically.”

Although most courses on Memrise deal with foreign languages, teachers in other subjects are also starting to bring the technology to their classroom. Simon Birch from The Broxbourne School in Hertfordshire, for instance, uses it to teach the advanced terminology needed for food technology exams, while his school’s English department are using it to drill spelling. “The benefits for literacy can’t be overstated,” Birch says.

The Memrise team are now hoping to develop further features that might help teachers like Birch and Traynor – by providing them with data on students’ progress, so they can see which bits of the course are failing to stick. And following Memrise’s success, other companies seem to be seeing the potential of applying the art and science of memory to learning apps. For instance, the Cerego app, which launched in September 2013, also times your learning and testing to boost recall, and its team have so far launched courses on brain anatomy, music theory and art history. The team’s preliminary tests on school students suggests that classes perform between 20-50% better using the app, and they are actively working with teachers and educational institutions to develop courses together.

So are we coming close to the relaxed, effortless learning that Cooke first envisaged? Traynor thinks so; many of his class are so hooked that they readily practice Spanish on their iPads at home, to the point that he now has to plan four or five lessons in advance. “That’s the strength of it,” he says. “The learning just doesn’t stop.”

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140307-how-to-learn-like-a-memory-champ

How your kid can rule the Science Expo

Bill Nye the Science Guy tells you how to assist your son or daughter in wowing the judges and landing a trophy

 

Guide Inspiration

Kids in Preparatory School don’t have to experiment with uranium. Ask your kid to look around the kitchen with a questioning eye: why is fizzy cold-drink bubbly? Why do some bottles have caps and others have corks? Comparing items shows the critical thinking that judges value, so go beyond just observation.

 

Step Back

Once your child has settled on a subject, its time for you to back off. Judges can tell when an adult has interfered too much; besides the child will learn more by taking the reins. Request a simple assignment instead. Say you’ll be the ‘assistant’ to set the tone. Ask questions instead of providing explicit instructions.

 

Follow the method

Judges will look to see if the student stayed with the scientific method (hypothesis, experimentation, refine the idea, experimentation, final statement…remember). If your child becomes upset because the experiment isn’t working, just say that’s part of the process. After all, that’s how Science works.

 

Present with style

Solid Science beats loud flashy displays every time. Keep the presentation to a trifold, going easy on the neon and glitter. And resist the urge to edit; you can point out glaring errors in the report, but don’t swat the occasional stray comma or sloppy letter. This is one time when too much perfection can thwart success.

 

Ideas for people struggling to find a project

1. Test different dishwashing liquids on greasy plates to see which ones clean best. Are manufacture’s claims all they’re up to be?
2. Put tea-leaves into a cup with water and stir. The leaves aren’t thrown to the outside as you’d imagine, but move to the middle. How come? Try it with things like peppercorns or sunflower seeds. How do they compare?
3. Test how testing affects critical thinking. Ask your child to solve problems while testing and not texting, note the relapsed times. Then have him or her replicate the experiment with other people. Why are the results the way they are?

 

Adapted from Men’s Health (March 2013 Edition)

Our Moon is 65 million years younger than we thought

Earth’s moon started forming up to 65 million years later than some previous estimates, according to a study released on Wednesday that uses a new way to calculate the birthday of the 4.47 billion-year-old planet’s only natural satellite.

The mega-asteroid that smashed into Earth, launching debris that later became the moon, happened about 95 million years after the birth of the solar system, research in this week’s issue of the journal Nature showed.

The finding disputes, with a 99.9 percent degree of accuracy, some previous estimates that the moon-forming impact occurred as early as 30 million to 40 million years after the solar system’s formation, some 4.58 billion years ago.

The new study is based on 259 computer simulations of how the solar system evolved from a primordial disk of planetary embryos swirling around the sun. The programs simulate the crashes and mergers of the small bodies until they meld into the rocky planets that exist today.

By that geologic clock, Earth’s last big chuck came from a Mars-sized body that hit about 95 million years after the solar system’s formation, the study showed.

“We think that the thing that hit Earth and ended up forming the moon, the lion’s share of it stayed on Earth. A small fraction of its mass and some material from Earth was pushed off into space to form the moon,” astronomer John Chambers, with the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington DC, said in an interview.

“That was probably the last big event,” he added.

The previous assessment was based on measuring the naturally occurring radioactive decay of telltale atoms inside lunar rocks. The same process, however, also led to findings that the impact happened between 50 million and 100 million years after the solar system’s formation.

“Our new method is independent of radiometric techniques and so we break through the controversy,” lead researcher Seth Jacobson, with Cote d’Azur Observatory in Nice, France, wrote in an email.

The results also open another even bigger mystery about why some planets, like Mars, form relatively quickly, while others, like Earth and possibly Venus, take far longer.

Analysis of Martian meteorites and the computer simulations indicate Mars was finished in just a few million years.

There are no known Venus meteorites, and spacecraft so far have not been dispatched to either Mars or Venus to collect samples.

“Discovering that the moon-forming impact occurred late is surprising because we know from Martian meteorites that Mars formed relatively quickly. How this discrepancy arises is another big question for the future,” Jacobson said. (Editing by Marguerita Choy)

Source: http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2014/04/03/our-moon-is-65-million-years-younger-than-we-thought

7 a day may be the new 5 a day

London – Many of us feel we are doing well if we manage to eat our recommended five a day.

But now a study has found that if we want to enjoy a longer life, eating seven or more daily portions of fruit and veg is the way to do it.

The research has found that seven or more portions a day cuts the risk of dying prematurely by 42 percent compared with having one a day.

According to the research, raising consumption from five a day to seven cuts the chances of dying from cancer by 25 percent and from heart disease by 31 percent.

Some experts want the World Health Organisation’s guidelines advising us to eat five a day changed following the study by University College London (UCL).

But others believe moving the goalposts to seven will deter people from even trying to be healthier.

At present, only one in four adults in Britain eats five a day and among teenagers, it is just one in ten. Lead author Dr Oyinlola Oyebode of UCL, said: “The clear message here is the more fruit and vegetables you eat, the less likely you are to die at any age.”

Naveed Sattar, professor of metabolic medicine at the University of Glasgow, said it was important to “examine seriously” raising guidelines to seven a day.

“It could send out a clear message that many of us need to try harder to eat fruit and veg,” he added.

The researchers followed 65 000 people aged 35 or over living in England between 2001 and 2013. The fruit and veg portion size recommended for adults is 80g and researchers asked the group how many 80g portions they had eaten in the previous 24 hours.

The risk of death was found to fall by 36 percent among those eating five to seven portions a day, while three to five reduced the risk by 29 percent. One to three portions was linked to a 14 percent reduced risk of death, says the study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. The researchers asked the group whether they ate various categories of fruit and veg. They found that overall, the fresh vegetables category offered the most health benefits, followed by salad and then fruit.

Although frozen fruit and veg are considered by doctors to be as healthy as fresh, in this study they were included in a category with less healthy tinned fruit and veg.

The researchers said they took other lifestyle factors such as smoking into account as much as possible.

Brian Ratcliffe, professor of nutrition at the Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, said: “The people eating the highest levels of fruit and vegetables in this study were also likely to display other healthy characteristics such as lower prevalence of overweight, higher activity levels and fewer smokers.

“The call to increase the five a day advice seems a little premature considering most people do not achieve this target and the differences between five a day and seven a day in this study are small.”

Dr Nita Forouhi of the MRC Epidemiology Unit at the University of Cambridge, said: “It is too early to change the current five a day message on the basis of this study.” – Daily Mail

Source: http://www.iol.co.za/lifestyle/eat-seven-a-day-for-a-longer-life-1.1669940#.Uz2YB3m6dGg

Dog and Human Brain Link Revealed

Devoted dog owners often claim that their pets understand them. A new study suggests they could be right.

By placing dogs in an MRI scanner, researchers from Hungary found that the canine brain reacts to voices in the same way that the human brain does.

Emotionally charged sounds, such as crying or laughter, also prompted similar responses, perhaps explaining why dogs are attuned to human emotions.

The work is published in the journal Current Biology.

Lead author Attila Andics, from the Hungarian Academy of Science’s Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, said: “We think dogs and humans have a very similar mechanism to process emotional information.”

Eleven pet dogs took part in the study; training them took some time.

“We used positive reinforcement strategies – lots of praise,” said Dr Andics.

“There were 12 sessions of preparatory training, then seven sessions in the scanner room, then these dogs were able to lie motionless for as long as eight minutes. Once they were trained, they were so happy, I wouldn’t have believed it if I didn’t see it.”

The canine brain reacted to voices in the same way that the human brain does

For comparison, the team looked at the brains of 22 human volunteers in the same MRI scanners.

The scientists played the people and pooches 200 different sounds, ranging from environmental noises, such as car sounds and whistles, to human sounds (but not words) and dog vocalisations.

“It is the first time we have seen this in a non-primate” – Attila AndicsEotvos, Lorand University

The researchers found that a similar region – the temporal pole, which is the most anterior part of the temporal lobe – was activated when both the animals and people heard human voices.

“We do know there are voice areas in humans, areas that respond more strongly to human sounds that any other types of sounds,” Dr Andics explained.

“The location (of the activity) in the dog brain is very similar to where we found it in the human brain. The fact that we found these areas exist at all in the dog brain at all is a surprise – it is the first time we have seen this in a non-primate.”

The team used a variety of techniques to train the dogs

Emotional sounds, such as crying and laughter also had a similar pattern of activity, with an area near the primary auditory cortex lighting up in dogs and humans.

Likewise, emotionally charged dog vocalisations – such as whimpering or angry barking – also caused a similar reaction in all volunteers,

Dr Andics said: “We know very well that dogs are very good at tuning into the feelings of their owners, and we know a good dog owner can detect emotional changes in his dog – but we now begin to understand why this can be.”

However, while the dogs responded to the human voice, their reactions were far stronger when it came to canine sounds.

“It would be interesting to see the animal’s response to words rather than just sounds” – Prof Sophie ScottUCL

They also seemed less able to distinguish between environmental sounds and vocal noises compared with humans.

About half of the whole auditory cortex lit up in dogs when listening to these noises, compared with 3% of the same area in humans.

Commenting on the research, Prof Sophie Scott, from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, said: “Finding something like this in a primate brain isn’t too surprising – but it is quite something to demonstrate it in dogs.

“Dogs are a very interesting animal to look at – we have selected for a lot of traits in dogs that have made them very amenable to humans. Some studies have show they understand a lot of words and they understand intentionality – pointing.”

But she added: “It would be interesting to see the animal’s response to words rather than just sounds. When we cry and laugh, they are much more like animal calls and this might be causing this response.

“A step further would be if they had gone in and shown sensitivity to words in the language their owners speech.”

Secret To Thinking Like A Genius

Albert Einstein famously said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” They’re both important, says physicist and Nobel Prize recipient Frank Wilczek, but knowledge without imagination is barren. Take his subject of theoretical physics. As Wilczek says a lot of what you do is to try to understand Mother Nature’s mind and her sense of beauty to see how the laws of physics could be more beautiful.

Not many people truly appreciate what happened in physics in the last part of the 20th Century. We understood at a level whose profundity would be difficult to exaggerate what matter is. We really have the equations for the different fundamental building blocks of matter – the different particles have mathematical characterisations that are precise and elegant. They have no secrets, in principle we have the equations.

The bad news, however, is we are not so good at solving them. There are still gaps in fundamental understanding, we have very good equations or practical purposes, but they are kind of lop-sided; they are beautiful but not quite as beautiful as they should be given they are close to God’s last word in some sense. We’re trying to think of better ways to solve the equations, which takes a lot of imagination because they describe an unfamiliar world – it’s a very small world and things behave differently in it. The only way to get experience is to play around with the equations and imagine how they might behave in different circumstances, it’s more like imaginative play than anything else.

The laws we have discovered, especially in the quantum world are so strange you have to play with them in your mind. Usually what you envision is wrong, but its mind expanding and every once in a while you see something that may be right. Sometimes it even is right.

The questions we are now able to ask are so compelling, so extraordinary. What is most of the Universe made of? Are the laws of physics ultimately unified? What was the Big Bang like? You just say them and they have such grandeur. The more you learn about the equations, the more you learn about physics, the more you learn how beautiful it is. That’s the real value, it’s an ornament to the human mind.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131127-secret-to-thinking-like-a-genius

Why Everyone Must Understand Science

Science is undoubtedly humanity’s greatest achievement, says AC Grayling, Master of the New College of the Humanities. People have to wake up to the fact that they have to be part of the story in thinking about science, and thinking about the meaning of science as it applies to our world.

People feel excluded by science and debates about science, they use laptops, they fly in planes, use appliances in the home and they don’t know what’s behind this technology. That is a problem, as it turns people into the slaves of our technology. The less people know the more they are likely to be manipulated or influenced by people who may not have their best interests at heart.

People are aware that there are lots of problems with the environment and the climate. If people knew more about the science behind this, they more likely they would be to press governments that are involved in policy decisions.

We have to start this at school. Our traditional way of teaching science is that the people who are learning it will go on to be scientists. For many people, that’s not the way to go. People could get a good understanding of science, without the need to have technical expertise. Universities tend to be very over-specialised very early on. Educated people should be challenged to have knowledge across the humanities and sciences. And in society there needs to be more interchange between people at the coal-face of science and the people on the street.

We have to have a healthy scepticism, says Grayling, people can’t just shut their eyes to things that are important. We now have the technologies and the opportunities to go out there and capture imaginations and invite people to have a much better understanding of science.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20130527-we-all-must-be-science-literate

Can we travel faster than the speed of light?

“It is impossible to travel faster than light, and certainly not desirable, as one’s hat keeps blowing off.”
Woody Allen, Side Effects

Last summer, a small neutrino experiment in Europe called OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus) stunned the world with a preliminary announcement that it had clocked neutrinos travelling just a few fractions of a second faster than the speed of light. The news even briefly overshadowed the far more recognizable Large Hadron Collider’s ongoing hunt for the Higgs boson.

Despite careful hedging by scientists, the popular imagination jumped right from neutrinos to a viable spacecraft for fast interstellar travel. After all, the prospect of faster-than-light (FTL) travel has been a science fiction staple for decades, from wormholes and Star Trek’s original warp drive, to the FTL “jumps” used to evade the Cylons in SyFy’s Battlestar Galacticareboot. It takes years, decades, centuries even to cross the vast expanses of space with our current propulsion technology – a realistic depiction of the tedium of space travel in entertainment would likely elicit the viewer equivalent of “Are we there yet?”

So the OPERA announcement was bound to generate excitement, even if the neutrinos in question were only moving nanoseconds faster than light – hardly sufficient to outrun the Cylons, but nevertheless faster than c, the cosmic speed limit set by Albert Einstein back in 1905.

Unfortunately, the euphoria was premature: the OPERA results were incorrect, thanks to a calibration error. The culprit: a faulty cable connection in the GPS system used to time the neutrinos along their journey. That killjoy Einstein wins again.

But if the OPERA saga did tell us anything, it’s that the idea of travelling faster than light continues to capture the imagination. As Hollywood screenwriter Zack Stentz (Thor, a.k.a. “Vikings in Space”) said recently at aLos Angeles panel on the science of superheroes, “Every science fiction writer who wants to get out of the solar system [within a human lifetime] gloms onto that. It’s the leap of faith that lets you tell stories on this bigger canvas.”

“You cannae change the laws of physics”

“Leap of faith” is a particularly relevant phrase to use here. The fact is we’ll never be able to travel beyond the speed of light, at least based on our current understanding of established physics.

As any object with mass accelerates – like a proton in the LHC – it gains energy, always needing just a little bit more energy to accelerate even further. The LHC, the largest and highest-energy particle accelerator we have, boosts protons as close to the speed of light as we can get, but they never quite hit the mark. If a proton did achieve that speed, it would need infinite energy to go any faster, and we don’t have an infinite supply of energy.

Equations don’t tend to lie, especially ones that have been tested and re-tested in countless experiments for over a century. For all practical intents and purposes, the speed of light is an insurmountable threshold.

But physicists would never make any progress at all if they threw in the towel quite that easily, and nobody thinks Einstein will have the final word in perpetuity. Many scientists are happy to consider the possibility of violations of relativistic principles, even if none have yet been experimentally confirmed.

One of the earliest proposed possibilities for FTL travel involved a hypothetical particle called a tachyon, capable of tunnelling past the speed of light barrier. This turned out to be more of a mathematical artifact rather than an actual physical particle.

However, another reason for all the OPERA-tic excitement was that back in 1985, physicists proposed that some high-energy neutrinos might really be tachyons, capable of interacting with an as-yet-known field, giving them just enough of an energy boost to break through the barrier. Such tachyon-like neutrinos would supersede photons as the fastest particles in the universe.

OPERA’s calibration error dashed those hopes, but there are still plenty of potential loopholes to be explored, such as the Star Trek-inspired warp drive mechanism first proposed by Mexican physicist Miguel Alcubierre in 1994. In general relativity, spacetime is dynamic, not static, warping and bending in response to the presence of mass or energy. Alcubierre suggested that it might be possible to encase a spaceship within a “warp bubble”, whereby space contracted in front of the craft and expanded behind it, enabling it to travel faster than light. But within that bubble, spacetime would remain essentially flat and the craft would technically “obey” the cosmic speed limit.

Alas, once again we face an energy problem: achieving that degree of curvature would require enormous amounts of energy – and negative energy at that – equivalent to the mass of Jupiter. To propel a spacecraft across the Milky Way galaxy may require more energy than can be found in the mass of the entire universe. A more energy-efficient ring-shaped design for such a warp drive was described recently at a symposium on interstellar space flight, offering a meager shred of hope to diehard space acolytes that for future generations, warp drive will be a reality.

However, given what we know about general relativity and quantum field theory, “It almost certainly can’t be done,” says Ken Olum, a cosmologist at Tufts. “Of course, if we are talking about quantum gravity, it’s hard to know, because we don’t really know what that is.”

Former Nasa scientist Kevin Grazier, who was the technical consultant for Battlestar Galactica, says that a version of the Alcubierre warp drive inspired the “jump drive” used in that series. It was based on the assumption that, in this fictional world, the Colonials had merged theories of electromagnetism and gravity, such that if you could create a very intense electromagnetic field, it would be functionally equivalent to an intense gravitational field capable of warping spacetime. Turning that ingenious fiction into a viable reality is another matter altogether.

Brane gain

If we really want to get speculative, Olum suggests FTL travel would be possible if exotic concepts, like those that emerge from superstring theory, prove to be correct.

We inhabit four-dimensional spacetime, but various permutations of superstring theory suggest our universe is just one of many, co-existing within a bubble of five-dimensional spacetime called the “bulk.” Within that bulk, our universe lines up in parallel with all the others, just like the pages in a book. Olum explains that, hypothetically, one could take a shortcut through the bulk, thereby arriving at your destination sooner than if you had travelled along your four-dimensional surface, or brane (short for membrane) as it is known.

Even then, there is a catch. “In brane theories, only gravitons can travel through the bulk,” says Olum. So one would need to invent a machine that could scan an object and transmit the information in the form of gravitons to a second machine on the other end which would then reconstruct that object – shades of teleportation, only with gravitons.

Considering we have yet to observe gravitons in our most powerful accelerators, and the current record for teleporting small clouds of atoms is the relatively non-Cylon-troubling distance of 143 kilometres (88 miles), this scenario must also remain firmly in the realm of science fiction, at least for now. Science advances, but it does so slowly, at a pace nowhere near the speed of light.

Why catch tunes get trapped in our heads

“Earworms”, some people call them. Songs that get stuck in your head and go round and round, sometimes for days, sometimes for months. For no apparent reason you cannot help yourself from humming or singing a tune by Lady Gaga or Coldplay, or horror upon horrors, the latest American Idol reject.

To a psychologist – or at least to this psychologist – the most interesting thing about earworms is that they show a part of our mind that is clearly outside of our control. Earworms arrive without permission and refuse to leave when we tell them to. They are parasites, living in a part of our minds that rehearses sounds.

We all get these musical memories, and people appear to have different ones, according to a team at Goldsmiths University in London, who collected a database of over 5,000 earworms. True, the songs that we get stuck with tend to be simple and repetitive, but it seems we are not all singing the same number one song at the same time.

Lost in music

Neurologist Oliver Sacks wrote in his book Musicophilia that earworms are a clear sign of “the overwhelming, and at times, helpless, sensitivity of our brains to music”. Music is defined by repetition, just like earworms, and this might make earworms so hard to shake – they are musical memories that loop, say a particular verse or a hook, forever repeating rather than running to completion. Some people report that singing an earworm to the end can help get rid of it (others report in frustration that this does not work at all).

As well as containing repetition, music is also unusual among the things we regularly encounter for being so similar each time we hear it. Fences are visually repetitive, for example, but each time you see the same fence you will look at it from a different angle, or in different light. Put a song on your stereo and the sound comes out virtually identical each time. Remembering is powerfully affected by repetition, so maybe the similarity of music engraves deep grooves in our mind. Grooves in which earworms can thrive.

Another fact about earworms is that they often seem to have something interesting or usual about them. Although they will often be simple and repetitive bits of music, tunes that become earworms have a little twist or peculiarity, something that makes them “catchy”, and perhaps this is a clue as to why they can take hold in our memory system. If there was nothing unique about them they would be swamped by all the other memories that sound similar too.

Slave to the rhythm

If you have got a particularly persistent earworm you can suffer an attack of it merely by someone mentioning the tune, without having to hear it. This proves that earworms are a phenomenon of long-term memory, rather than merely being a temporary “after-image” in sound.

But this is not the whole story. Human memory researchers have identified so called “slave systems” in our short-term memory, components of the mind which capture sights and sounds, keeping them alive for a short time while we focus on them.

One slave system is the “mind’s eye”, capturing visual information, another is the “inner ear”, the part we use for remembering phone numbers, for instance. It is this second part that seems to get infected with earworms. Rather than rehearse our plans for the day, idle thoughts, or lists of things to remember, the inner ear gets stuck on a few short bars of music or a couple of phrases from a song. A part of us that we normally do not have to think about, that should just do what we ask, has been turned against us, tormenting us with a jukebox request that we never asked for.

That our minds are not a unity is one of the basic insights of modern psychology – it is the story Dr Freud was telling, and, although it differs on many of the details, modern cognitive neuroscience says a similar thing. The sense of our selves is not the only thing going on in our minds, psychology says. The mind is an inner world which we do not have complete knowledge of, or have control over.

Mind games

Fortunately psychology can provide some vital intelligence on how to deal with an unruly mind. Consider the famous “don’t think of a white bear” problem, which as it implies involves trying not to think about white bears. Try this yourself, or you can set it as a challenge for a loved one you would like to torment. This problem is a paradox: by trying not to think of a thing you constantly have to be checking if you are still thinking of it – re-invoking precisely the thing you are trying not to think of.

The general solution for the white bear problem is to do something else, to avoid both thinking of the white bear and not thinking of the white bear. For earworms, the solution may be the same. Our inner ear, a vital part of our cognitive machinery for remembering and rehearsing sounds, has become infected with an earworm. This is a part of ourselves which is not under our control, so just sending in instructions to “shut up” is unlikely to be of much help (and has been shown to make it worse). Much better is to employ the inner ear in another task, preferably something incompatible with rehearsing the earworm.

If earworms survive because of their peculiarity, the hook that makes them catch, then my prediction for ridding yourself of an earworm is to sing songs that are similar. If your mind is poisoned by Brittany Spears’ Toxic, for instance, then try singing Kylie Minogue’s appropriately titled Can’t Get You Out Of My Head. By my theory this will erode the uniqueness of the memory habitat that lets the earworm survive. Let me know if it works!

 

Source:http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120411-why-do-songs-stick-in-our-heads

Hacking our senses to boost learning power

Some schools are pumping music, noises and fragrances into the classroom to see if it improves exam results – could it work?

What did your school smell like? Was it noisy or peaceful?

It might not seem important, but a growing body of research suggests that smells and sounds can have an impact on learning, performance and creativity. Indeed, some head teachers have recently taken to broadcasting noises and pumping whiffs into their schools to see whether it can boost grades. Is there anything in it? And if so, what are the implications for the way we all work and study?

There is certainly some well-established research to suggest that some noises can have a detrimental effect on learning. Numerous studies over the past 15 years have found that children attending schools under the flight paths of large airports lag behind in their exam results.

But general noise seems to have an effect too. Bridget Shield, a professor of acoustics at London South Bank University, and Julie Dockrell, now at the Institute of Education, have been conducting studies and advising politicians on the effects of all sorts of noises, such as traffic and sirens, as well as noise generated by the children themselves. When they recreated those particular sounds in an experimental setting whilst children completed various cognitive tasks, they found a significant negative effect on exam scores. “Everything points to a detrimental impact of the noise on children’s performance, in numeracy, in literacy, and in spelling,” says Shield. The noise seemed to have an especially detrimental effect on children with special needs. `

Shield says the sound of “babble” – the chatter of other children, is particularly distracting in the classroom. Architects that fashion open-plan classrooms in schools would do well to take this on board. “People are very distracted by speech – particularly if it’s understandable, but you’re not involved in it.” This phenomenon is also known as the irrelevant speech effect, she says, adding that “it’s a very common finding in open-plan offices as well.”

Whether background sounds are beneficial or not seems to depend on what kind of noise it is – and the volume. In a series of studies published last year, Ravi Mehta from the College of Business at Illinois and colleagues tested people’s creativity while exposed to a soundtrack made up of background noises – such as coffee-shop chatter and construction-site drilling – at different volumes. They found that people were more creative when the background noises were played at a medium level than when volume was low. Loud background noise, however, damaged their creativity.

This makes sense for a couple of reasons, says psychologist Dr Nick Perham, at Cardiff Metropolitan University in the UK, who studies the effect of sounds on learning but was not involved in the study.  Firstly, he says, sounds that are most distracting tend to be very variable.  A general hum in the background suggests a steady-state sound with not much acoustical variation. “So there’s not much there to capture your attention – nothing distracting the subjects,” he says. At the same time, the background noise might cause the subjects to be in a slightly heightened state of arousal, says Perham. You don’t want too much or too little arousal. “Medium arousal is best for good performance. So it might be that a general hum in the background gives an optimum level of arousal.” With that in mind, Perham suggests there may be some benefit to playing music or other sounds in an art class or other situations where creativity is key.

Many teachers all over the world already play music to students in class. Many are inspired by the belief that hearing music can boost IQ in subsequent tasks, the so-called Mozart effect. While the evidence actually suggests it’s a stretch to say classical music boosts brainpower, researchers do think pleasant sounds before a task can sometimes lift your mood and help you perform well, says Perham, who has done his own studies on the phenomenon. The key appears to be that you enjoy what you’re hearing. “If you like the music or you like the sound – even listening to a Stephen King novel – then you did better. It didn’t matter about the music,” he says.

However, it’s worth considering that music is not always helpful while you’re trying to work. Trying to perform a task which involves serial recall – for instance, doing mental arithmetic – will be impaired by sounds with acoustic variation, which includes most types of music, says Perham. (Except a few, like extreme death metal.) Songs with lyrics, on the other hand, are more likely to interfere with tasks that involve semantics – such as reading comprehension. “The task and the sound are important, when you have both of them using the same process then you get problems,” he says.

So, it seems that schools that choose to screen out disturbing noises and create positive soundscapes could enhance the learning of their students, so long as they make careful choices.

This isn’t the only sense being tweaked to affect learning. Special educational needs students at Sydenham high school in London are being encouraged to revise different subjects in the presence of different smells – grapefruit scents for maths, lavender for French and spearmint for history.

Less research has gone into the idea of whether scents can help with cognitive performance, although there have been intriguing findings. In 2003, psychologist Mark Moss, at Northumbria University, carried out a range of cognitive tests on subjects who were exposed either to lavender or rosemary aromas. “Rosemary in particular caught my attention as it is considered to be arousing and linked to memory,” he says, whereas lavender is considered to be sedating. Moss found that those who were smelling lavender performed significantly worse in working memory tests, and had impaired reaction times for both memory and attention-based tasks, compared to controls. Those in the rosemary group, on the other hand, did much better than controls overall in the memory tasks, although their reaction times were slower.

Why might this be? It’s perhaps not surprising that smells affect memory, given that the brain’s olfactory bulb is intimately linked to the hippocampus, which deals with learning. But Moss suspected there was more to it. To explore the pharmacological effects of rosemary on the body, he drew blood samples from volunteers who had just undergone cognitive tests in a rosemary-infused room, and found that they had elevated levels of a compound called 1,8-cineole in their blood. Previous research has shown that this compound increases communication between brain cells, which might explain how it improves brain function.

So, as you finish reading this story, take a moment to tune into your senses. Close your eyes and take a few nice deep breaths. What can you hear and smell? The answer, it seems, may affect how much you learnt in the past few minutes.

Source: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20131022-hacking-senses-to-boost-learning