Why Some Words Are More Memorable, How Hair Growth Works, and How Fish End Up in Landlocked Lakes
Curiosity Weekly
Warner Bros. Discovery
4.6 • 964 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
- NIH study finds out why some words may be more memorable than others. (2020). EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-06/nion-nsf062620.php
- Xie, W., Bainbridge, W. A., Inati, S. K., Baker, C. I., & Zaghloul, K. A. (2020). Memorability of words in arbitrary verbal associations modulates memory retrieval in the anterior temporal lobe. Nature Human Behaviour. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-020-0901-2
Hair growth, explained by Steffie Drucker
- Hair Loss: The Science of Hair. (2010, March 1). WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/skin-problems-and-treatments/hair-loss/science-hair#1
- Venton, D. (2015, April 21). The Big Question: Why Does Hair Grow in Some Places But Not Others? WIRED. https://www.wired.com/2015/04/hair-only-in-some-places/
- Feltman, R. (2016, July 19). Dear Science: Why does the hair on my head grow longer than the hair on my body? The Washington Post. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/07/19/dear-science-why-does-the-hair-on-my-head-grow-longer-than-the-hair-on-my-body/?arc404=true
- Curiosity. (2018). How Does Hair Growth Work? [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iBhmxVeJZ-I
- SciShow. (2015). How Does Hair Know When to Stop Growing? [YouTube Video]. In YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rf6BnOLb5xs
- Martin, R. D. (2016) Beauty and the Beard. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/how-we-do-it/201802/beauty-and-the-beard
Fish eggs migrate to landlocked lakes via bird poop by Grant Currin
- Koumoundouros, T. (2020). We May Finally Know The Extreme Route Fish Take Through Air to Colonise New Lakes. ScienceAlert. https://www.sciencealert.com/squishy-fish-eggs-can-survive-harrowing-journeys-through-duck-guts
- Lovas-Kiss, Á., Vincze, O., Löki, V., Pallér-Kapusi, F., Halasi-Kovács, B., Kovács, G., Green, A. J., & Lukács, B. A. (2020). Experimental evidence of dispersal of invasive cyprinid eggs inside migratory waterfowl. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 117(27), 15397–15399. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2004805117
- Silva, G. G., Weber, V., Green, A. J., Hoffmann, P., Silva, V. S., Volcan, M. V., Lanés, L. E. K., Stenert, C., Reichard, M., & Maltchik, L. (2019). Killifish eggs can disperse via gut passage through waterfowl. Ecology, 100(11). https://doi.org/10.1002/ecy.2774
- Dispersal of fish eggs by water birds – just a myth? (2018). ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/02/180219103258.htm
- [Curiosity Daily Episode] Remembering Words on the Tip of Your Tongue, Parkways vs. Driveways, and A Flapping Spacecraft to Explore Venus https://curiositydaily.com/remembering-words-on-the-tip-of-your-tongue-parkways-vs-driveways-and-a-flapping-spacecraft-to-explore-venus/
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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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