Daily HealthBeat Tip

The owl and the baseball glove

From the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, I�m Ira Dreyfuss with HHS HealthBeat.

How do you remember an owl holding a baseball glove?

That was one of the problems for people in a memory experiment at Washington University in St. Louis. Brenda Kirchoff was trying to learn what strategies people use to memorize. Her study in the journal Neuron was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

Kirchoff found four basic ways to remember:

Carefully studying how the objects looked
Making a sentence about the objects
Visualizing, like a cartoon about it
And relating it somehow to the person�s life.

Kirchoff says many effective learning strategies share something:

When you think carefully about the meaning of information, that helps you to remember information much better than if you do a more simple strategy such as just rehearsing the information over and over again." (10 seconds)

Learn more at www.hhs.gov.

HHS HealthBeat is a production of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. I�m Ira Dreyfuss.

Last revised: October 13, 2006

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