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There hasn't been a lot of research into the effects of herbs and spices on cognition and the brain, unfortunately. But on the positive side, the risk of side-effects is very low, so we don't need a lot of evidence for it to be worth trying.

In my article on using cognates to help you learn vocabulary in another language, I gave the example of trying to learn the German word for important, ‘wichtig’, and how there’s no hook there to help you remember it (which is why so many of us fall back on rote repetition to try to hammer vocabulary into our heads).

The Suggested Benefits of Homework

The most obvious presumed benefit of homework is, of course, that it will improve students' understanding and retention of the material covered. However, partly because this (most measurable) benefit has not been consistently demonstrated, it has also been assumed that homework has less direct benefits:

Remembering a skill is entirely different from remembering other kinds of knowledge. It’s the difference between knowing how and knowing that.

I recently reported on a study showing how the gestures people made in describing how they solved a problem (the Tower of Hanoi) changed the way they remembered the game. These findings add to other research demonstrating that gestures make thought concrete and can help us understand and remember abstract concepts better.

The thing to remember about Ericsson’s famous expertise research, showing us the vital importance of deliberate practice in making an expert, is that it was challenging the long-dominant view that natural-born talent is all-important. But Gladwell’s popularizing of Ericsson’s “10,000 hours” overstates the case, and of course people are only too keen to believe that any height is achievable if you just work hard enough.

The much more believable story is that, yes, practice is vital — a great deal of the right sort of practice — but we can’t disavow “natural” abilities entirely.

How many words do you need to learn?

An analysis of English vocabulary* has found that the first 1000 words account for 84.3% of the words used in conversation, 82.3% of the words encountered in fiction, 75.6% of the words in newspapers, and 73.5% of the words in academic texts. The second 1000 accounts for about another 5% (specifically, 6% of conversation, 5.1% of fiction, 4.7% of newspapers, 4.6% of academic texts).

As we all know, rhyme and rhythm help make information more memorable. Here's a few ideas that may help you use them more effectively.

Rhythm and rhyme are of course quite separate things, and are processed in different regions of the brain. However, they do share some commonalities in why and how they benefit memory. Rhyme and rhythm impose pattern. For that reason, rhyme and rhythm are particularly valuable when information is not inherently meaningful.

Find out about the pegword mnemonic

Here are pegwords I've thought up in the Spanish language.

As with the original example, let's try it out with our cranial nerves.

En español, los nervios craneales son:

Nowadays every school has to have computers. I don't refer to legal requirementbut to perception. Schools are judged on how many computers they have. It would be more to the point if they were judged on their computer-savvy.