Words.

All my life, I have been intrigued with words. They beguile me, enchant me, hypnotize me. All words derive from the same alphabet, same coding, same strokes of a pen. They express needs, wishes, desires, delight, frustration - essentially, emotion.
We are told stories every day - on the phone, perhaps about one's day; through the Internet, about one's life or idiosyncrasies; in real life, about events or ideas; on paper, through supporting arguments and theses.
We were taught, in grade school, that there are four types of sentences: to persuade one to take action, to exclaim one's thoughts, to explain one's ideas, and to ask what one wishes to know. Are these like the multiplication, division, subtraction and addition that we memorized, that build up the foundation upon which we construct our mathematical formulas and hypotheses? It is beautiful to see that whatever we have learned, we can always build upon.
It is also beautiful that through reading one's writing, I can always experience what they experience; learn what they learn; see, perhaps feel, how they feel. It is an amazing feeling to get pulled into a piece of fantastic fiction, and to worry for the protagonist's state. It is empowering to read about a journey for someone else, about said person overcoming an obstacle, because through their memoir, one can relate and make connections to oneself. It feels relieving to form one's opinion of the events stated in a news article and to perhaps sign one's name on a petition.
Perhaps that is why I will always be an advocate for education and literacy everywhere.
But enough gushing about the beauty of words; in my next post, I will talk about the psychology of language (or what I know of it.)

Nostalgia, con't con't con't.

Long term memory can store large chunks of information for an extremely long duration. A long-term memory stored, has the potential to be remembered for perhaps all of one's life. Through repetition, information like telephone numbers, or your childhood home phone number, can be stored in the long-term memory.

Short-term memory uses audio to store information, as I mentioned earlier; long-term memory stores ideas and information by association/meaning. In 1966, Baddeley realized that his test subjects in general had more difficulty remembering words with similar meanings, even after they had been repeated several times.

While short-term memory is controlled by regions of the frontal and parietal lobe, long-term memory is stored with the help of the hippocampus. Without the hippocampus (I love this name), new memories cannot be stored as long-term memory, and the individual has a short attention span.

One little fact: SLEEP is important when trying to consolidate information. Numerous studies have shown that memory has a link to getting sleep between the time in which the information is absorbed, and the actual test in which the information is retracted.