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Does emotion help us remember? That's not an easy question to answer, which is unsurprising when you consider the complexities of emotion.

First of all, there are two, quite different, elements to this question. The first concerns the emotional content of the information you want to remember. The second concerns the effect of your emotional state on your learning and remembering.

The effect of emotional content

It does seem clear that, as a general rule, we remember emotionally charged events better than boring ones.

Because it holds some personal resonance for me, my recent round-up of genetic news called to mind food allergies. Now food allergies can be tricky beasts to diagnose, and the reason is, they’re interactive. Maybe you can eat a food one day and everything’s fine; another day, you break out in hives. This is not simply a matter of the amount you have eaten, the situation is more complex than that.

What do we mean by word-finding problems?

Here are some examples:

• increasing use of circumlocutions rather than specific terms (e.g., "I wonder where the thing that goes here is")
• use of empty phrases, indefinite terms, and pronouns without antecedents (i.e., referring to something or someone as "it" or "him / her" without first identifying them by name)
• increased frequency of pauses

These problems are all characteristic of Alzheimer's, but also, to a much lesser extent, of normal aging.

Subliminal learning achieved notoriety back in 1957, when James Vicary claimed moviegoers could be induced to buy popcorn and Coca-Cola through the use of messages that flashed on the screen too quickly to be seen. The claim was later shown to be false, but though the idea that people can be brainwashed by the use of such techniques has been disproven (there was quite a bit of hysteria about the notion at the time), that doesn’t mean the idea of subliminal learning is crazy.

The story method (sometimes called the sentence mnemonic) is the most easily learned list-mnemonic strategy, although it is not as widely known as the other simple methods we’ve talked about so far.

As its name suggests, the story method involves linking words to be learned in a story. While this is most obviously useful for learning actual lists, it can also be used for remembering the main points of a passage. In such a case, you need to reduce each point to a single word, which hopefully has the power to recall the whole point.

I want to talk to you this month about an educational project that’s been running for some years here in New Zealand. The Project on Learning spent three years (1998-2000) studying, in excruciating detail, the classroom experiences of 9-11 year olds. The study used miniature videocameras, individually worn microphones, as well as trained observers, to record every detail of the experiences of individual students during the course of particular science, maths, or social studies units.

I’ve discussed on a number of occasions the effects that stereotypes can have on our cognitive performance. Women, when subtly reminded that females are supposedly worse at math, do more poorly on math tests; African-Americans, when subtly reminded of racial stereotypes, perform more poorly on academic tests. And beliefs about the effect of aging similarly affect memory and cognition in older adults.

I’ve recently had a couple of thoughts about flow — that mental state when you lose all sense of time and whatever you’re doing (work, sport, art, whatever) seems to flow with almost magical ease. I’ve mentioned flow a couple of times more or less in passing, but today I want to have a deeper look, because learning (and perhaps especially that rewiring I was talking about in my last post) is most easily achieved if we can achieve "flow" (also known as being ‘in the zone’).

Let’s start with some background.

Our society gives a lot of weight to intelligence. Academics may have been arguing for a hundred years over what, exactly, intelligence is, but ‘everyone knows’ what it means to be smart, and who is smart and who is not — right?

Of course, it’s not that simple, and the ins and outs of academic research have much to teach us about the nature of intelligence and its importance, even if they still haven’t got it all totally sorted yet. Today I want to talk about one particular aspect: how important intelligence is in academic success.

Compulsory Education: When it starts and how long it lasts

Around the world, for the most part, compulsory schooling starts at 6, although some start at 7, and a very few at 5 or even younger. There is less consensus about how long compulsory education should last, but 9 years is the most common length, with 10 years running a close second.