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I forgot what I was going to write about. Oh, yeah.  I should have drawn it. A new study says if you need to remember something, forget the memorizing of the first letters of the word it starts with -- like, you want to get apples so think America or accessories (my favorite), to put the "A" in your mind, and hopefully, you will link it with apples when you go to the grocery store.  Oh, wait.  The word for that is mnemonic.  Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that drawing pictures of information that needs to be remembered is a strong and reliable strategy to enhance memory. "We pitted drawing against a number of other known encoding strategies, but drawing always came out on top," said the study's lead author, Jeffrey Wammes, PhD candidate in the Department of Psychology, at newswise.com. "We believe that the benefit arises because drawing helps to create a more cohesive memory trace that better integrates visual, motor a...

When you see red, do you remember it as red? According to a new study , maybe not.  Newswise.com reports that, though people can distinguish among millions of colors, we have trouble remembering specific shades because our brains tend to store what we’ve seen as one of just a few basic hues, a Johns Hopkins University-led team has discovered. New research disputes standard assumptions about memory, demonstrating for the first time that people’s memories for color are biased in favor of “best” versions of basic colors over the colors they actually saw. For example, there’s azure, there’s navy, there’s cobalt and ultramarine. The human brain is sensitive to the differences between these hues —we can, after all, tell them apart. But when storing them in memory, people label all of these various colors as “blue,” the researchers found. The same thing goes for shades of green, pink, purple, etc. This is why, they say, someone would have trouble glancing at the color of ...

Quick.  Gorgeous man. Eating yogurt. What do you think of? If you didn't think of John Stamos, they're right.  A new study says we tend to remember products when the celebrities endorsing them are clearly associated with the item. But if I'd said, Novak Djokovic and Wilson or Dunlop, chances are you'd remember the racquets. The Web site reports that Katie Kelting, a marketing researcher at the University of Arkansas, found that when consumers are shown two ads featuring the same celebrity, they are more likely to forget information when the celebrity is endorsing a product that is only moderately associated with the celebrity’s fame. When a product is either a really good -- or really bad -- fit with the reason for the celebrity’s fame, consumers are more likely to remember the information. But what happens when there is a low fit or match, such as LeBron James starring in a fast-food commercial? James is one of the world’s premier athletes. This woul...

For those of you not old enough to remember, back in the '80s, when Americans still celebrated space, thousands of people lined up at what was then called the Kennedy Space Station to watch a missile with, among its astronauts, an elementary school teacher, when it mushroomed into a huge explosion taking off and everyone inside died. I was working at a huge corporation back in those days as a newsletter writer and my editor -- a big burly guy known for never tucking his shirts in, because he couldn't -- came rushing into my office (yes, even the lowest on the totem pole had offices back then), and screamed, "The Challenger blew up!" I can remember to this day his puffy red face and were those tears, telling me the unthinkable had happened. (Of course, this was before Newtown.)   The spaceship had exploded and scattered in white-hot pieces all over the blazing blue sky, in front of the teacher's proud parents and, I believe, her kids.   We learned later that ...