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Curiosity Weekly

Why Some Words Are More Memorable, How Hair Growth Works, and How Fish End Up in Landlocked Lakes

Curiosity Weekly

Warner Bros. Discovery

Science

4.6964 Ratings

🗓️ 3 August 2020

⏱️ 11 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Learn about why some words are more memorable than others; how hair growth works; and how fish end up in landlocked lakes.

Brain study reveals why some words are more memorable than others by Kelsey Donk

Hair growth, explained by Steffie Drucker

Fish eggs migrate to landlocked lakes via bird poop by Grant Currin

Subscribe to Curiosity Daily to learn something new every day with Cody Gough and Ashley Hamer. You can also listen to our podcast as part of your Alexa Flash Briefing; Amazon smart speakers users, click/tap “enable” here: https://www.amazon.com/Curiosity-com-Curiosity-Daily-from/dp/B07CP17DJY

 

Find episode transcript here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/why-some-words-are-more-memorable-how-hair-growth-works-and-how-fish-end-up-in-landlocked-lakes


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Transcript

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0:00.0

Hi, you're about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Curiosity.com.

0:06.2

I'm Cody Goff.

0:07.2

And I'm Ashley Hamer.

0:08.4

Today you learn about why some words are more memorable than others, how hair growth works, and how fish end up in landlocked lakes.

0:16.5

Let's satisfy some curiosity. Some words are easier to remember than others, aren't they?

0:22.8

Like, I have a handful of words I can never remember.

0:26.4

One of them is invincible.

0:28.6

No joke, I had to do an internet search of the definition

0:31.8

just to remember it for this story.

0:34.2

So why does this happen with some words more than others?

0:37.6

Well, a new study suggests that it comes down to a words relationship with other words.

0:43.0

During an epilepsy study at the National Institutes of Health,

0:46.0

researchers had epilepsy patients look at pairs of words from a list of 300 common nouns,

0:52.0

like hand and Apple. After a few seconds they saw one of the words they

0:56.6

just seen, like Hand, and then had to remember what it was paired with, Apple. In the end, the researchers found that, yeah, people recalled some words more successfully

1:06.6

than others. Words like Tank, Doll, and Pawn were remembered more often than words like street, couch, and cloud.

1:15.8

And it didn't matter what other words they were paired with.

1:18.8

When they tried the same test on 2,600 healthy volunteers, they saw the same thing.

1:24.4

But why?

1:25.7

To find out, researchers analyzed the most memorable words in a bunch of different ways.

1:30.7

Did they appear more often in the English language?

1:33.0

No.

...

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