Trouble with crossword puzzles? Improve your semantic memory

Can you distinguish the taste of a red wine versus a rosé? How about the look of a 1960s muscle car versus a foreign import? Do you prefer to grow lilies or tulips? Would you rather listen to Dark Side of the Moon or “Fly Me to the Moon”? To answer any of these questions, you need to use your semantic memory. Your semantic memory is your store of factual knowledge of the world and the meaning of words. It’s how you know that a fork is for eating (not twirling your hair) and what color a lion is. It’s both the source of your vocabulary and how you know what something does even if you don’t know the name of it — like that little bit of plastic that covers the end of a shoelace (an aglet). Use episodic memory to increase your semantic memory To form new semantic memories, you need to use your episodic memory to learn new information. For a week, month, or year, you might remember where you were and what you were doing when you learned a new fact. Over time, however, you will forget the context and just remember the fact. Once only the fact remains, it is part of your semantic memory. The left temporal lobe: Your brain’s dictionary Several landmark papers have examined where semantic memory is stored in the brain. In 1996, two related studies were published in an article in Nature. For the first, the researchers enrolled over 100 patients with strokes and other brain lesions in their left temporal lobe. (Put your finger on your left temple, just behind your eye —...
Source: Harvard Health Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Alzheimer's Disease Brain and cognitive health Healthy Aging Memory Source Type: blogs